MarinerTek IT Solutions 
Original Landscape
FareTec, Inc. is a medical device manufacturer, founded in 1991. They specialize in devices for pre-hospital care both in the civilian and military markets, domestically and abroad. Their business uses a hybrid Mac and Windows environment with a centralized Small Business Server 2008. Given their global product line it is important that their staff can access data anywhere in the world at any time. Since they host their own email a fail-safe system needed to be put in place to guard against internet service outages and server failure.
Project Designed and Deployed by Evan M. Kepner
MarinerTek Solution Design
MarinerTek optimized FareTec’s infrastructure using the hardware and software investments already in place. By leveraging the unused Remote-Web-Workplace feature of SBS 2008 we were able to ensure that FareTec employees had access to company resources anywhere in the world.
Someone from MarinerTek was always available to ensure that we were functioning as fast as possible. After this initial period we were able to take a slightly more methodical approach to fine tuning our system. Today we feel that all of our issues have been resolved and our system is running very well.
Internally we created a central resource pool using Active-Directory to easily present printers and shared storage to all the users. The backup system had not been tested and upon further investigation it was found to be faulty. A new backup system was put in place using their existing software and the native Windows backup tools.
Finally an email-redirection system was put in place to act as a both a SPAM filter and long-term email archive to protect against ISP outages or server failure. With this system users would still be able to access client email and clients would not receive bounce- back errors.
What I found really reassuring was that at no time did I sense any reluctance from them to educate us and train us on the proper care and feeding of our system. The prior company seemed to guard this information in hopes of additional service work we think. For us this is an essential element to a smooth running system.
Solution Results and ROI
The solution provided the following advantages to Faretec:
Global remote access
FareTec employees can now securely access company resources anywhere in the world.
Increased ROI
FareTec had not been fully leveraging the technology in which they had invested. We were able to highlight these features and deploy them without purchasing additional hardware or software. The overall business efficiency increased and they were ensured of full compliance with their current Microsoft licensing.
Created a fully fault-tolerant email system
Using the email-redirection system we created a completed fault- tolerant email system. When the FareTec router went down there was no bounce-back message to any clients – all email was collected and available online, it was then distributed to Exchange after the router was replaced.
Validated backup procedures
The previous backup software was not functioning properly, we corrected this and paired it with native Windows backup tools to ensure a complete disaster recovery solution.
We find the people from Mariner to be highly qualified and very responsive to our needs. They meet or exceed our expectations in all areas of service and expertise. I feel 100% comfortable recommending MarinerTek for all your network and computer requirements.
