EMC Enterprise Flash Drive Technology Enables Liaoning Mobile to Access Billing Information Nearly 70% Faster

HOPKINTON, Mass.- EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced that China Mobile Liaoning Company (Liaoning Mobile), a subsidiary of China Mobile, has dramatically enhanced the speed and performance of its customer relations management (CRM) system by adding enterprise flash drives to its existing EMC® Symmetrix® DMX-4 networked storage system.

EMC pioneered the use of enterprise flash drives technology in its Symmetrix and EMC CLARiiON® networked storage product lines to deliver unprecedented performance and energy efficiency. Enterprise flash drives help organizations reduce access time, latency and power consumption. For example, it would take thirty or more 15,000 RPM Fiber Channel disk drives to deliver the same performance as a single flash drive.

In a single month, the system has to manage three billion records generated by 20 million users in the 56 county-level subsidiaries and 14 branches of Liaoning Mobile. Running this workload on traditional 15K hard disk drives, Liaoning Mobile experienced a bottleneck delivering records to the CRM system. This bottleneck led to a delay between the reads and writes reaching the database index and severely limited responsiveness to customers. To address this challenge, Liaoning Mobile deployed EMC’s enterprise flash drive technology in 2008 to improve the operational efficiency of its CRM system and provide its customers with more rapid bill checking.

Liaoning Mobile installed just nine 146GB enterprise flash drives in November 2008. To optimize how the drives are used, the company tiered its information so only data from the current month will be saved on the flash drives and older data will be stored on the fibre channel disk. This has helped reduce the amount of time it takes for a customer to check billing information by nearly seventy percent.

Mr. Wang Xin, Director of the system maintenance office in the Business Support Center for Liaoning Mobile, and was the project manager for the enterprise flash drive deployment, said, “There is huge potential for flash technology in the telecom sector. For example, China Mobile’s province-level branches experience bottlenecks and congestion of data. Without flash technologies, they would need to buy more fibre channel disks and might not achieve their performance requirements. Due to the enhanced performance, several other province-level branches of China Mobile have added enterprise flash drives to their existing EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 networked storage system.”

Brian Gallagher, EMC Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Symmetrix and Storage Virtualization Group, added, “We have seen tremendous demand for enterprise flash drives, driven largely because of their dramatic impact on application performance and cost effectiveness. A small number of enterprise flash drives in a single system can speed up many applications. By placing the right data on the right tier of storage, leading organizations like Liaoning Mobile are able to realize significant performance gains which can translate into advantages for their business.”

EMC is currently the only vendor capable of providing comprehensive enterprise flash drive arrays, ranging from its high-end Symmetrix to the midrange CLARiiON® and Celerra®. In March 2009, EMC announced new, larger-capacity, second-generation Enterprise Flash Drives of 200GB and 400 GB with significant cost savings and performance improvements.