Visa Gears Up for Unprecedented Holiday Rush With EMC Enterprise Storage
Cutting-Edge EMC Software Also Speeds Development of New Visa Products and Services
HOPKINTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 21, 1998--EMC Corporation announced today that Visa International, the world's leading payment brand and the largest consumer payment system worldwide, has implemented EMC TimeFinder software and EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems to dramatically reduce the time needed for testing its transaction processing systems. As a result, Visa was able to ensure optimized performance during the holiday season, when consumer credit and debit purchasing reaches its highest volume.
Visa conducts its annual ''Stress Test'' to validate that the VisaNet Integrated Payment (V.I.P.) System is ready to support the expected volumes of credit and debit authorizations. Using EMC TimeFinder software and EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems, Visa has reduced the time required to back up and restore its more than two terabyte testing database from 10 hours to 15 minutes. Being able to test more quickly and efficiently with EMC enables Visa to better tune its systems for peak performance and around-the-clock data availability.
''At Visa, availability and reliability of the VIP system is of critical importance,'' said Michael McGraw, Visa's Vice President of Transaction Switching. ''The credit and debit authorization service must be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Anything less than 100 percent availability is unacceptable.''
McGraw added, ''Beyond keeping us running at peak performance - and realizing significant savings in yearly testing expenses -- EMC Enterprise Storage has assisted in the acceleration of the development, testing and introduction of new products. This has a direct impact on how successful we are in growing revenues and improving our customers' Visa experience.''
Using TimeFinder, Visa determined that its systems can handle performance levels in excess of 5,000 transactions per second, far exceeding its current requirements. ''Now that we know there's breathing room to support higher volumes, we can delay capacity upgrades and focus more on developing new services,'' noted McGraw.
Visa, based in San Francisco, also will implement TimeFinder to speed Year 2000 testing and help ensure its member banks are Year 2000 compliant.
''The hallmark of EMC Enterprise Storage is its ability to help companies do more with information than they ever thought possible,'' said Bob Dutkowsky, EMC's Executive Vice President of Markets and Channels. ''In the case of Visa, this means handling holiday surges with ease, keeping the world of business flowing smoothly, and getting new products developed and out to market faster than ever before. That's the EMC Effect.''
Traditional data mirroring involves an original disk and its reflected image on a second disk. EMC TimeFinder expands traditional mirroring techniques by non-disruptively creating multiple, independently addressable copies for backups, data warehouse loading, decision support applications, application development, Year 2000 testing and other activities that require copies of data. By issuing commands from the host system, these Business Continuity Volumes (BCVs) can be managed separately and used to run simultaneous tasks in parallel with one another. Once the task is complete, the volume can be resynchronized with the production volume, reassigned to another production volume or maintained in place for another task.
EMC Corporation, a Fortune 500 company based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, is the world's technology and market leader in the rapidly growing market for intelligent enterprise storage systems, software and services. The company's products store, retrieve, manage, protect and share information from all major computing environments, including UNIX, Windows NT and mainframe platforms. The company has offices worldwide, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EMC, and is a component of the S&P 500 Index. For further information about EMC and its storage solutions, EMC's corporate web site can be accessed at emc.com.
EMC and Symmetrix are registered trademarks and EMC Enterprise Storage and TimeFinder are trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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Contact:
EMC Corporation
David Farmer, 508-435-1000 (Ext. 77206)
farmer_dave@isus.emc.com
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