South Korea Online Trading Firm Kiwoom Securities Turns to IBM Flash Technology

Kiwoom Securities Co., Ltd.,
South Korea’s online financial institution, has turned to IBM Flash technology to
better manage its mounting data volumes and enable faster online trading to a
rapidly growing customer base.

Managing $2 billion in assets, Kiwoom is the largest online financial service
provider in the country specializing in securities trading. Through its four
divisions – retail, wholesale, investment banking and investment management –
it offers a complete portfolio of financial trading products to more than one million
corporate and individual clients. Kiwoom also operates an Internet fund mall
for retail brokerages and provides overseas direct trading services through its
Hero Home Trading System (HTS).

Kiwoom needed a way to minimize storage latency in order to speed up the
transaction cycle between the company and the Korea Stock Exchange.
Additionally the company needed systems that could scale performance quickly to
ensure that dealers have fast, always-on access to large volumes of data. The
company decided to transfer its business data from spinning disk storage to the
IBM FlashSystem – an all-Flash storage system that easily integrates
into customer’s storage infrastructure to dramatically improve
performance and efficiency over mechanical storage.

"Our online business model ensures
the flexibility necessary to offer the lowest commissions and highest customer
service," says JinMan No, CIO, Kiwoom Securities. "We have strengthened our competitive
advantage by introducing a cutting-edge infrastructure to successfully pursue a
non-store, online brokerage business model. IBM FlashSystem will contribute to
a dramatic increase of the transaction speed which will enable us to eventually
enhance our services and hold a dominant competitive position in the industry."

In addition, the trading environment the solution helped create is faster, more
cost-effective and easier to manage. It also can be extended in the future to
support competitive customer service.

Under the agreement signed in June, IBM installed its FlashSystem 710 with a
capacity to handle 1TB of data per system storage.

"Businesses are moving to all-flash
systems to boost critical application and operational data performance, gain
efficiency, and strategically deploy resources for data management,"
said Hyeongseok Kim, IBM Korea’s systems technology group storage division manager.

The FlashSystem, with its MicroLatency technology, can improve storage R/Ws
by as much as 20 times faster than spinning HDDs, providing organizations a storage
infrastructure that can operate consistently at performance,
including during peak periods.

IBM Korea worked with local business partner Daou Technology, Inc. to install
the system.