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MGIC SPEEDS ACCESS TO LOAN ARCHIVES WITH EMC TIERED STORAGE

EMC Corp announced that Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp (MGIC) has launched a comprehensive information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy based on EMC's tiered networked storage and information management software.

As a result, MGIC is able to align the information needs of its business with the optimal EMC storage tier to significantly reduce storage investment costs, dramatically speed access to archived images of loan documents and comply with government document retention regulations.

Jim Stirling, MGIC's vice president of Information Services, said, "The private mortgage insurance industry is highly competitive, so we depend on every advantage we can get. By allowing us to tier storage and automate manual processes, our information lifecycle management strategy has helped drive down our costs, as well as streamline internal operations. As a result, we can respond more rapidly and effectively to the needs of our customers and strengthen our overall competitive position."

Business-critical customer and financial data resides on MGIC's top tier of high-performance EMC Symmetrix and mid-tier EMC CLARiiON networked storage systems. MGIC stores images of loan-related documents in a content-addressed storage (CAS) environment based on EMC Centera.

"Our underwriters can work on a loan for an extended period of time, requiring us to store document images related to the loan on our higher-end, high-performance storage for up to six months before archiving them to tape," said Stirling. "However, if we needed to go back to a document, we would have to retrieve it from tape, which could take an hour or more. With ILM, we focused our top and middle tiers of storage on our core application data and write our document images to EMC Centera. Consequently, we reduced our costs by recovering more than a 3/4 TB of higher-cost storage that was previously reserved for images. Our internal users are happier since these documents are readily available. And, because the images are stored on Centera's read-only, protected format, we satisfy the federal regulations that govern document retention in our industry."

"The images are available on EMC Centera at our primary datacenter, and EMC's software allows us to automatically mirror them to another Centera at our recovery site," said Stirling. "We save on the cost of the tapes and offsite storage, don't have to worry about media conversions and no longer spend hours each week retrieving and organizing our tapes."

About EMC

EMC Corp is a provider of products, services and solutions for information storage and management that help organizations extract the maximum value from their information, at the lowest total cost, across every point in the information lifecycle. Information about EMC's products and services can be found at www.emc.com/.