Visa Uses EMC Software To Weather The Holiday Rush

With four shopping days still remaining, Visa InternationalInc. was confident enough about its IT infrastructure yesterday to brag about how smooth everything is operating this year, thanks to software from storage vendor EMC Corp.

Visa says EMC's products are helping its systems operate at maximum performance during peak shopping times, cut down on the company's testing expense, and directly contribute to better customer service and increased revenue.

The EMC TimeFinder software products create multiple copies of data for activities including backups, data warehouse loading, and year 2000 testing. The differentiating feature of TimeFinder is that it allows these activities while a system remains online. TimeFinder issues commands from the primary server so that volumes of data are managed separately and run jobs in parallel with each other. Once a job is completed, copies of data are automatically put back in sync with the primary data. Using TimeFinder, Visa was able to back up 2 terabytes of data in 15 minutes, compared with the ten hours it was taking before.