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Case Study 2 - Institutional Investment Manager - Network Relocation and Ongoing Technical Support

(120 users nationally, Chicago headquarters, 6 remote offices)

We were brought in to replace a national networking services firm, just weeks before the client was to move their Chicago national headquarters across town. Our competition was seen as not having a reliable track record, and in order to pull the move off without a hitch, the decision was made to switch to Intragration.

Prior to the move, several interruptions in Internet service were encountered as a result of the Internet service provider. Because this firm relies heavily on E-mail for communications, as well as the Internet for various market research services, the inability to access the Internet created a serious threat to business. We were involved immediately in order to assess the cause of the outage, and once it was determined that it was related to the Internet circuit itself, we were able to expedite the restoration of service by working closely with the Internet service provider. In this instance, we actually alerted the Internet service provider to the problem before they realized it was a problem.

When it came time to move, we learned the network infrastrucutre on the fly, with a 1 day site survey and network analysis. The network consisted of approximately 10 servers, 6 high-speed Ethernet switches, a 100Mb backbone, and Internet and VPN routers to the 6 remote offices. Everything was mapped, tagged, and at 5:00 PM on moving day, we packed it all up and handed it to the movers. 2 hours later, the process of putting the pieces back together started, and by 1:00 AM we were done.

Although the network equipment move was successful, the Internet service provider again failed. This time, the VPN circuit required to connect all 6 remote offices to the main office had not been provisioned apropriately by the provider, and it would be 2 weeks until the mistake could be corrected. On the fly, we were able to re-engineer the existing Internet circuit to accommodate both Internet traffic as well as the VPN connections to all the remote offices. As a result, what would have otherwise resulted in a 2 week communication blackout to all 6 remote offices ended up as a non-issue. When the provisioning correction was finally completed, service was restored to normal in 10 minutes.

Since the move, Intragration has been retained by this firm as the sole external networking service provider. We provide both on-call critical issue support, as well as staff-augmentation, onsite support and network administration. We have also performed network server performance audits and network traffic analysis for system upgrades and load balancing. We have recently been asked to provide a plan summary for deploying Metaframe over Windows Terminal Server for remote access, as well as a long-term analysis for technology direction.

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