Technical Information

Fluid Retail delivers a high value merchandising solution with minimal impact on IT resources. Its hosted authoring environment combined with flexible runtime options eliminates server software requirements and allows customers to maintain control of their online store.

Deployment Options

Fluid Retail allows organizations to maintain complete control over their online store with minimal impact on IT resources and without installing additional software or hardware. The Fluid Retail authoring environment, where interactive displays are created, is hosted on Fluid servers. Once authored, the displays contain only static files and can be hosted on any web server including: existing online store servers, media content networks like Akamai or Fluid's servers. This modified hosted model, extended across all Fluid Retail products, provides customers with a robust hosted environment that eliminates the need to install and maintain software while allowing the greatest flexibility of hosting options for runtime display assets.

Content Delivery

Fluid Retail has been implemented in conjunction with a range of content delivery partners including Akamai, Limelight Networks and Amazon's Cloud Front, among others. Fluid is happy to offer a full service hosting solution or utilize a customer's existing content delivery partner.

Hosting: Servers

The Fluid Retail authoring application is powered by enterprise-grade Intel hardware that features RAID storage mirroring and full back-ups. Built on top of the industry leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 Operating System, the Fluid Retail ASP is built on a highly secure and reliable base.

Hosting: Monitoring and Reliability

All hardware, software and networking is monitored 24/7 with onsite support staff. The network uptime Service Level Agreement stands at 99.99%. Additionally, the Fluid Retail ASP is tested at 5 minute increments from 22 separate Points of Presence from around the world to ensure rapid response times.

Hosting: Network

Fluid Retail is connected via multiple dual-entrance SONET OC-12 fiber rings as well as a gigabit fiber connection from a major metropolitan carrier. Upstream bandwidth is routed between multiple Tier 1 and Tier 2 transit providers including UUNet, Cable & Wireless, Layer42 and UnitedLayer as well as multiple peering points within the hosting network.

The network is designed so that there is no single point of failure. Multiple backbone routers maintain dual connections to the network core preventing equipment failure from affecting service.

Runtime Requirements

Built using Flash files and utilizing standard image and XML files, there are no additional web server requirements for Fluid Retail interactive displays. Simply copy the files to the appropriate directory, and any web server can deliver dynamic, interactive product content in a matter of minutes. Appropriate for either high bandwidth or dial-up connections, shoppers need only Flash Player 7.0 or higher, which is present on over 97% of all computers. Consumers that do not have the Flash Player installed will be shown a DHTML display or static product photo.