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Click on a title below to view the client case study

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Today, security is top priority and there are few industries who can tolerate a lack of security less than the Motion Picture Industry. One of our clients, Picture Head, works with many different major motion picture companies to develop commercial trailers and perform audio post-production so they need to maintain the highest network security standards in the industry.

When Picture Head was being audited by a major motion picture company to see if their internal LAN infrastructure would hold up to the level of security they require, Picture Head's Director of IT approached Fluid Networks to help them through the audit process and ensure they can prove their security.

Fluid Networks was able to leverage their investment in high-end, high-capacity network switches and firewalls to break up the internal network into many virtual LAN's and created access controls to control what type of data could flow from one network to another. Picture Head ultimately passed the audit and has since been granted the contracts to work Post-Production on many major motion pictures as a result... and Yes, you have heard of these Movies!

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With today's fast-moving IT environment, demand for bandwidth and fast access to cloud-based services is not slowing down. Just six years ago, Tri-Counties Regional center asked Fluid Networks to build a WAN architecture which was redundant and could centrally control web access at all six sites. Fluid Responded with a combination T1 and Fixed Wireless architecture.

Now, however, Tri-Counties needs speed over all. Fluid's solution was to deploy Fiber internet circuits at ALL locations, then setup a distributed firewall model that is centrally managed so Tri-Counties can centrally apply web and application access control and reporting while not introducing a central point of failure. Their WAN is screaming and more redundant than before. This solution is ready to last another six years and beyond!

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When Dana B Goods decided to move to a new location, their 8+ year old servers were in danger of not coming back up again. Fluid Networks brought out the Visible-DP BDR system and did a snapshot of every server and verified each server would boot up on the BDR box. If any of the production servers were to fail after the move, we were ready.

After taking great care during the move, all servers came up as though they had never been down and the BDR system wasn't needed. A testament to the quality of the hardware Fluid Networks installed eight years ago. That said, Fluid was ready with a turn-key solution in the event things went bad. This is the kind of forward thinking that makes the VIT line of services unique.

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Network issues can occur with the most simple changes. When TCRC experienced an outage with their mail server the call was made to Fluid. With our deep diving tools, our engineers were able to tell that the network itself was performing properly and the path to the Internet remained in tact. After reviewing firewall and interim router logs it was determined that email sessions were coming from two different internal IP addresses... But the customer only has one email server... hmmm.

Turns out the IT team was doing some maintenance on the email server and had assigned a secondary IP address to one of the network cards and the server automatically started using that secondary IP as a source for outbound email traffic but that IP address didn't mesh with the firewall and router source rules that were in effect so email stopped.

Without our tools and deep-dive ability to troubleshoot these types of issues, this client might have spent days working out this problem. Fluid had it fixed within 30 minutes.

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Myriad clients today insist on putting voice and video on the same broadband connection and can make it challenging to ensure voice and video quality while users use the Internet. When Barry's tickets was suffering with poor voice quality on their four-site wide area network, they brought Fluid Networks in to troubleshoot.

We deployed our tools into the network and found a number of elements that needed to be changed. Our tools identified issues involving everything from servers which were introducing errors on the network to the need to change to a different broadband provider. Throughout the processes, Fluid engineers made adjustments to the hardware and software traversing the WAN and ultimately was able to protect the voice between sites. Now, Barry's sales people are able to take a call and be confident that they will likely close a sale without worrying about being able to communicate effectively regardless of which site they are working from.

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When Barry's Tickets got tired of fighting their bloated Point of Sale application and decided to throw fast and efficient server hardware at the problem, they approached Fluid Networks. We worked with Barry's internal IT staff and external technology consultants to come up with a new plan to virtualize all of their critical servers onto newer, faster hardware AND lay in a new backup and disaster recovery system to keep them all protected.

Other IT companies were telling them they needed to invest over $50,000.00 in new server and virtualization costs but Fluid Networks gave them a more effective and scalable strategy for half the price and our strategy continues to pay dividends to this day.

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Fluid Networks is a great partner to companies who have their own internal IT staff but who can't, for one reason or another, maintain the level of tools and expertise that we do.

When Compulink was having their carpet cleaned after hours one Friday, Fluid Networks was alerted from our monitoring platform that servers and network hardware suddenly dropped offline. Within minutes, a call was made to the IT manager who was unaware that anything was happening. He went onsite and found there was a carpet cleaning crew who had thrown a breaker, thus killing power to half of the server room. Once the UPS's died, the servers and everything else connected went down.

Because of our monitoring tools, the IT manager was able to act quickly to get the power back up and the servers back online before it was discovered by their user base and, most importantly, before it affected productivity.

Now, If they had our full suite of monitoring deployed, we would have received the alert as soon as the power went over to the UPS and might have avoided ANY downtime at all... Thus, the best case scenario for the case we make where the deeper we can go into your network, the more effective we can be at detecting and remediating these issues.

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What happens if your primary Windows Active Directory server goes down and you don't have a backup domain controller in production? Stony Apparel found out the hard way when they had a hardware failure in their Primary Domain Controller thus keeping any user from being able to log into their computers and work.

Luckily, they had, just months before, installed our Backup and Disaster Recovery appliance and it was fully deployed and in operation. Within one hour, Fluid Networks had spun up the backup image as a virtual server on the BDR appliance and the customer was back up and running. Meanwhile, they remained in production on that temporary virtual server while we worked with Dell to repair the failed server.

Once the Server was repaired, we took advantage of the opportunity to turn it into a virtual server platform and then simply copied the virtual server from the BDR appliance back to their production server. Not only did they only experience a very minimal disruption in service, but they did not have any loss of service when we put their server back into production AND they gained a platform that allows for other virtual servers to be built on that one server, thereby using their capital investment in hardware to its fullest.

Fluid networks turned a major failure into a major win for the customer... I hate to think what would have happened if they still had their old tape backup system in place.

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Three years ago, Holland Electronics experienced their worst nightmare... Their Exchange server's database became corrupt and the entire company was unable to access their email and no email was going in or out. We were called in to get the Exchange server back up and running. Luckily, they had good tape backups in place and roughly 3 days later, the backups were restored and they were back in business...

Yes it took 3 days to get that server back up and running. Why you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked that question. You see, traditional tape backup solutions are VERY slow to restore and that's AFTER you find the correct tape with the backup you wish to restore from. Once the backup was restored the database had to run maintenance to bring it into synch. Put it all together and it was three business days later before they had email.

But now they have a BDR... so when their Exchange server hung up in the summer of '12 and decided it didn't want to boot any longer it took our techs only 30 minutes to get that server back into production, running on our BDR appliance. That's right 30 minutes and it was as if nothing ever happened.

This gave us ample time to identify the root cause of the server failure, address it and then simply move the virtual image of the running server back to the physical server it started on. Imagine having that kind of technology at work in your business... It is here now and it is ready for you.

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When Picture Head recently acquired an audio post-production company that spanned three physical sites, they called on Fluid Networks to put the plan together to make all the sites talk to one another in the short-term without limiting them in the long-term as strategic decisions are made that might conflict with short-term goals.

Fluid Networks worked directly with fiber, cable and fixed wireless carriers to get high-speed internet connectivity laid in within weeks and assembled all the necessary components to create a secure wide area network on the fast track. Then Fluid assembled a scratch Virtual Server strategy that allows for inter-site failover and laid it in without incident.

Now Picture Head's IT staff can focus on their production technology and not worry about keeping the sites securely communicating. What's more, they are staged and ready for their new 10gig fiber WAN solution and won't have to forklift upgrade anything to get there!

- UPDATE -

Picture Head's 10G fiber WAN solution has been implemented and is working like a champ! As promised, we didn't have to replace one piece of hardware in order to make it work. Now they have a faster WAN running between their six sites than most companies have running on their LAN! Fluid Networks architected, installed and now manages the entire network architecture.

Maybe you don't need something so extreme in your business. That's alright! If Fluid Networks can perform so well at the cutting edge, imagine how well we can implement tried and true technologies for you. Give us a try; we can't wait to show you what we can do.


Client success stories paint just part of the picture

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