Fuzzy Duck Case Study

Fuzzy Duck Design in Minnetonka, MN is a visual communication firm specializing in logo development, corporate identity, illustration and animation. This means demanding computer users that require not only a workstation, but also a network that can keep up with them.

In order to make the best upgrade choices Fuzzy Duck turned to The Foundation to complete an office audit, to make recommendations, and to implement a cost-effective solution.

The Foundation began the project by providing a detailed "Orange Book" office audit covering every aspect of Fuzzy Duck's network, workstations and printers. An Orange Book provides a detailed snapshot of a client's complete computing environment, and it provides a solid foundation from which strategic planning can be based. It also points out weaknesses in current hardware or procedures, which are, or could become, liabilities for the company. An Orange Book also serves as an invaluable inventory for insurance or accounting purposes.

Fuzzy Duck was relying on two aging Snap! servers (network attached storage devices) for their file sharing solutions.

The project began with the Power Mac receiving a 512MB RAM upgrade to give it more memory to work with. Second, a new internal 120GB hard disk drive provided ample space for all of their shared files. A new gigabit Ethernet card was added so that it could take advantage of one of their HP switch's gigabit ports. This addressed the network bottleneck created by several 100MB workstation connections accessing the server at the same time. The resulting file sharing performance is significantly faster than that of the Snap servers, and it can be fine tuned with OS X Server's robust management capabilities.

To address Fuzzy Duck's backup requirements, The Foundation installed a new AIT2 high capacity backup tape drive on the server. All of their data gets backed up automatically to a single tape cassette, with user intervention limited to a single tape switch once a week.

For their more demanding users, The Foundation provided three new Power Mac G5 workstations to quickly power through their most challenging graphics tasks. One of these workstations will be called on to produce video projects with very large file sizes. The Foundation connected this workstation to the HP ProCurve's second gigabit port for very fast file sharing to the office server.

Since our last technological upgrade three years ago, our staff has tripled and we have expanded our services to include multimedia, web graphics and animation. This type of work required a faster and more reliable network. The converted G4 was a great server solution and the cost savings allowed us to focus more funds on new workstations and a backup solution, Eddie Ulrich, Owner, Fuzzy Duck Design.