Aardman Animations, the producers of Wallace and Gromit films, has implemented a system to help improve performance of its local area network (Lan).

The company’s network is spread across four sites in Bristol supporting 250 users. The Lan supports a wide variety of complex creative applications and internet traffic ranging from web sites and bandwidth-intensive graphics to file servers and database replications.

Aardman identified a need to increase visibility of the performance of the network infrastructure to allow the IT team to quickly diagnose and resolve problems before they had a serious impact on the creative team and users.

The firm is using Network Instruments’ Observer technology, supplied by Open Reality, which segments network and application issues to aid troubleshooting and efficient monitoring across the Lan.

‘We have an incredible volume of bandwidth-intensive applications shared across a complex environment. We needed a solution that could handle our systems,’ said Howard Arnault-Ham, head of IT for Aardman Animations.

Aardman is also looking to expand its network to support voice over IP, and is planning to install Network Instruments’ hardware probes which will give the IT department the ability to monitor multiple links simultaneously from the Observer console.