Watson Wyatt

Knowledge Center

With a strategic approach to data management, Maxium Solutions (now Skipton Group) helps consulting firm put data on demand

When companies want expert advice on how to manage their two most important resources – people and money – they beat a path to the doorstep of Watson Wyatt Worldwide. The consulting firm combines human capital and financial expertise to deliver business solutions that drive shareholder value.

In Canada, Watson Wyatt serves its client base from five offices across the country. Significant growth in Toronto presented both a problem and an opportunity. The problem was that existing technology was coming under more and more pressure as increasing loads of data narrowed the backup window. With storage on some servers maxed out, and storage on others hardly used, Watson Wyatt saw an opportunity to design an infrastructure roadmap that would address Toronto’s needs and four other offices with tightly coupled business and processing requirements. In so doing, the firm could optimize its IT resources and provide common automated methodology - essential for delivering on demand data to hot sites and ensuring continuity of client service.

When the firm challenged IT suppliers to devise a solution, IBM Premier Business Partner Maxium Solutions Inc. came up with plan for an on demand operating environment that would simplify and optimize Watson Wyatt’s IT resources, provide much-needed flexibility and resiliency, and reliably put information into the hands of people who needed it.

The key was an end-to-end, centralized and automated approach to data management, featuring an IBM Storage Area Network (SAN), Linear Tape-Open (LTO) library and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) as the glue for automated backup and recovery. As part of the infrastructure, the new solution is based on the IBM xSeries server. Read More