case study

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Loewy Group

Network Migration

The Loewy Group is a highly prestigious brand design and promotion organisation based primarily in London. Loewy provides brand communication services in most major sectors. These range from FMCG, retail and travel to IT, public sector and pharmaceuticals. Their consultancy and market research teams design, develop and implement integrated campaigns across a range of media including advertising, corporate communications, direct marketing, packaging and online services

Requirement

After a succession of full and part-time network managers and consultants, the Loewy IT infrastructure was poorly performing and unstable. This situation was further compounded by Loewy's use of both Apple and PC clients and the lack of understanding by the network managers of how these two operating systems should co-exist.

Shift F7 was primarily commissioned to resolve an ongoing issue regarding the instability of the primary Exchange 2000 mail server. This immediate problem was quickly identified and resolved. However, during the investigation and general heath check many other issues were highlighted and it was recommended that the infrastructure should be overhauled and migrated to AD2003.

Migration Project

After performing a full investigation, Shift F7 were able to produce a migration plan that best suited the client requirements whilst minimising service down time. It was decided to replace the existing underpowered servers and create a new secure independent domain which could run in parallel to the existing one whilst resources were migrated across.

The migration process was performed over a two week period with virtually zero down time, with no information loss from ether file or mail services. Data was back captured from local copies to the centralised services to improve efficiency, resilience and security.

Loewy Group now operates a clean, secure and reliable network utilising Windows 2003 and Apple OSx servers. The new network is now able to cope efficiently and reliably with both Apple and PC clients using a variety of mail products accessed locally and remotely.

Project Conclusion

The Loewy Group are continuing to expand as they outperform their rivals. The new network infrastructure and design is allowing them to seamlessly integrate each new acquisition in a secure and reliable manor, without overburdening the in-house network support team.

www.loewygroup.co.uk