Morneau Shepell, the largest Canadian-based firm providing human resource consulting and outsourcing services, needed to expand its storage infrastructure with a solution that would offer enterprise-class capacity, performance and reliability at an afford-able price point. The company integrated two IBM Storwize V7000 units into an existing heterogeneous storage infrastructure, providing the flexibility to expand capacity and virtualize the storage area network.

1. IBM Systems and Technology Professional Services
Case Study
Morneau Shepell
boosts storage with
IBM Storwize V7000
Founded in 1962, Morneau Shepell Inc. is the largest Canadian-based
Overview firm providing human resource consulting and outsourcing services. The
company’s solutions are designed to assist employers in managing the
The need
financial security, health and productivity of their employees. With over
Morneau Shepell needed to expand its 2,400 employees in offices across North America, Morneau Shepell Inc.
storage infrastructure with a solution that
would offer enterprise-class capacity, provides its services to organizations in Canada, the United States and
performance and reliability at an afford- around the globe. With its services, Morneau Shepell serves over six
able price point. million employees across all of its clients.
The solution
Morneau Shepell integrated two Meeting the challenge of growing
IBM® Storwize® V7000 units into an storage demands
existing heterogeneous storage
As a leading provider of human resources consulting and outsourcing
infrastructure, providing the flexibility to
expand capacity and virtualize the services for nearly 50 years, the company’s data demands had grown sub-
storage area network. stantially over time, in terms of both sheer volume and complexity.
The benefit
“We handle pension and benefits administration as well as health and
The IBM solution improves storage
performance, availability and reliability,
productivity solutions for many companies across the country, as well as
reduces storage costs compared to the the United States,” explains Michael Lin, vice president of information
previous solution, and provides advanced technology for Morneau Shepell. “And with that obviously comes a
features to increase storage efficiencies.
large set of data that we need to manage and maintain for our clients. As
we’ve grown through the years, our storage needs have grown as well,
with different types of storage solutions being introduced within
our infrastructure.”
Although this growth has varied from year to year depending on the
number of client wins, the company was seeing its data storage require-
ments expand by about 30 terabytes annually. And beyond the fact that
the company was simply running out of storage space and needed to fill
the gap, Lin says they were also looking to transition from tape-based
backup storage to disk-based backups, further contributing to the
company’s need for more storage capacity.

2. IBM Systems and Technology Professional Services
Case Study
A powerful solution at an attractive price
Because the company needed a storage solution that could scale rapidly
“From a performance, and also integrate into an existing multivendor storage environment at
reliability and price-point Morneau Shepell, Lin says any new solution would need to support a
perspective, Storwize was virtualized storage area network (SAN) for higher utilization, better
performance and future scalability—at a reasonable price.
the right choice for us.”
“Data is critical in our business,” says Lin. “We need to keep it available
—Michael Lin, vice president of information and we need to keep it secure. And one of the things that we wanted to
technology, Morneau Shepell
do was get into the enterprise storage space in terms of performance and
reliability. But because we’re a midsize company, we wanted to keep it at a
midsize cost.”
After a review of offerings from other leading storage solution providers,
the ideal solution turned out to be the IBM Storwize V7000. This
innovative storage capability offers Morneau Shepell the potential to
virtualize the existing heterogeneous storage environment. The
Storwize V7000 also delivers compelling storage technologies such as thin
provisioning, IBM Easy Tier™ automated tiering and RAID protection,
all in a compact and cost-effective package.
“The price point for the Storwize V7000 was very attractive,” says Lin.
“Across the board, from a performance, reliability and price-point
perspective, Storwize was the right choice for us.”
Enterprise-class features for midsize
data storage
The solution at Morneau Shepell consists of two Storwize V7000 units,
each with 43 terabytes of storage capacity—one located at a data center
in Montreal, and the other at a data center in Toronto. Both Storwize
V7000s function within an existing 200-terabyte storage environment that
also includes one IBM XIV® Storage System and IBM System Storage®
SAN Volume Controller (SVC).
The Storwize V7000 at the Toronto location supports the company’s
VMware environment, which includes over 300 virtual clients and is
expected to keep growing. The unit in Toronto also supports the
company’s Microsoft Windows-based application environment, which
includes sensitive pension and benefits administration data stored as
scanned forms and other unstructured content. In Montreal, the Storwize
V7000 has been used to create a virtualized SAN environment, giving
storage administrators a single, homogeneous view of capacity across all
of the company’s storage devices.
2

3. IBM Systems and Technology Professional Services
Case Study
“Organizations have to work within existing footprints,” says Lin.
Key components “You can’t throw out existing investments. The Storwize V7000 is helping
us bridge the gap between what we have now and what we’re evolving to
● IBM® Storwize® V7000
in the future.”
Simple setup, powerful performance
According to Lin, Morneau Shepell handled installation and setup of the
Storwize V7000 devices internally, a process he described as “extremely
easy,” with installation taking less than a day.
“Right out of the gate we knew that we were getting a platform that’s
going to have the reliability and performance we needed moving for-
ward,” explains Lin. “It gave us real peace of mind to know we were
getting both the storage we needed and a product that could meet our
performance and reliability requirements.”
Since the initial implementation, Morneau Shepell has used about
56 terabytes out of the 86 terabytes available in their two Storwize
V7000 units. The IBM solution has delivered higher storage perform-
ance, ease of management and powerful virtualization capabilities. What’s
more, there have been no outages with Storwize V7000, giving Morneau
Shepell the high availability the company and its clients require.
Meeting storage growth challenges with
IBM solutions
Morneau Shepell is anticipating continued data growth as the client
base expands and as the needs of those individual clients expand. In
addition, the company is actively pursuing opportunities to expand their
digitization of paper processes—an initiative that will add to the com-
pany’s growing requirements for storage capacity. As a result, Lin says the
company will continue to rely on the capabilities of Storwize to increase
storage efficiencies. The company is also exploring Metro Mirror and
Global Mirror technologies for cross-site replication of data.
“We view IBM as not just a vendor that supplies products and services,
but as a partner to help our business grow,” says Lin. “And as our busi-
ness grows, we are going to rely on IBM to help us cope with the needs
that we have moving forward.”
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.
Visit us at ibm.com/systems/storage
For more information about Morneau Shepell, visit:
http://www.morneaushepell.com
3

4. © Copyright IBM Corporation 2011
IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, New York 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
August 2011
All Rights Reserved
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Easy Tier, Storwize, System Storage and XIV are
trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation
in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked
terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark
symbol (® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks
owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may
also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of
IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information”
at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States,
other countries, or both.
Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks
of others.
References in this publication to IBM products, programs or services do not imply
that IBM intends to make these available in all countries in which IBM operates. Any
reference to an IBM product, program or service is not intended to imply that only
IBM’s product, program or service may be used. Any functionally equivalent product,
program or service may be used instead. Offerings are subject to change, extension or
withdrawal without notice.
All client examples cited represent how some clients have used IBM products and
the results they may have achieved. Performance data for IBM and non-IBM products
and services contained in this document was derived under specific operating and
environmental conditions. The actual results obtained by any party implementing such
products or services will depend on a large number of factors specific to such party’s
operating environment and may vary significantly. IBM makes no representation that
these results can be expected or obtained in any implementation of any such products
or services.
The information in this document is provided “as-is” without any warranty, either
expressed or implied.
Please Recycle
TSC03137-USEN-00