Kiwoom Securities Co., Ltd., South Korea's leading online financial institution, has turned to IBM (NYSE: 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 of 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 an IBM FlashSystem 710 with a capacity to handle 1 terabyte 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 IBM FlashSystem, with its MicroLatency(TM) technology, can improve storage read/writes by as much as 20 times faster than spinning hard drives, providing organizations a storage infrastructure that can operate consistently at high performance, including during peak periods.
IBM Korea worked with local business partner Daou Technology to install the system.