South Korea online trading firm uses IBM flash to speed up online transactions

ARMONK, USA: Kiwoom Securities Co. Ltd, South Korea's leading 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.

The IBM FlashSystem, with its MicroLatency 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.