The MPLS-OPS Archive

[Irwin Lazar <ILazar@burtongroup.com>]

Here's another company embracing MPLS - though they are an enterprise,
they're using it to provide VPN services to energy firms through their
telecommunications subsidiary.

irwin

_______________________________________________________________
Today's focus: Energy giant offers MPLS VPNs
By Jim Duffy

Oil and gas giant - and service provider - Schlumberger last 
week tapped Cisco to supply the infrastructure for its new 
Multi-protocol Label Switching-based IP VPN service.

Schlumberger has offered IT connectivity, security, outsourcing 
and consulting services to companies in the gas and petroleum 
industries for about 18 months. The new MPLS VPN service, 
called DeXa.Net Secure Private Network (SPN), is the latest 
connectivity offering from the $14 billion global energy 
company.

DeXa.Net SPN is designed to deliver faster, more reliable and 
more secure connectivity services to other energy companies. It 
also provides options for users to transmit large volumes of 
data, including video and other time-sensitive applications, 
Schlumberger officials say.

"We need to have a very reliable network with quality of 
service enabled to make sure that the drilling information you 
send from Nigeria back to headquarters in Houston is not 
delayed," says Jean-Michel Rouylou, vice president, Secure 
Connectivity Services for Schlumberger Network & Infrustructure 
Solutions (NIS). "Decisions are going to be taken based on the 
information people see on the screen. MPLS can let us carry 
over the backbone the quality of services, the differentiated 
services, but also can do it securely."

The DeXa.Net SPN backbone will employ up to 38 Cisco 12400 and 
7206 routers in 30 points of presence. Currently, the service 
has 10 to 15 customers, including Actaris, a Belgium provider 
of meters, systems and services for utilities industries. 

Schlumberger evaluated routers from Juniper Networks and 
Nortel's Passport multiservice switches for the DeXa.Net SPN 
backbone, along with the Cisco routers. 

Juniper had better offering

Even though Juniper had a superior offering to Cisco's, Rouylou 
says Juniper lacked Cisco's broad global reach. 

"Juniper came out as a better product," he says. 
"Unfortunately, the size of Juniper was a restricting factor in 
the sense that if you want to buy a Cisco router in Asia, Cisco 
is there; Juniper is not."

Cisco also is Schlumberger's incumbent enterprise vendor, so 
the company is familiar with the products and their command 
structures, Rouylou says.

Meanwhile, Nortel's Passport switches were ruled out because of 
their ATM core, he says. All of Schlumberger's applications are 
TCP/IP-based and Rouylou says the company wants to avoid a 
layer of overhead associated with protocol translation.

DeXa.Net SPN is a Layer 3 MPLS VPN service, meaning subscriber 
VPN routing information is shared among Cisco routers using the 
Internet Engineering Task Force's RFC 2547 specification and 
the Border Gateway Protocol. RFC 2547 has come under fire for 
alleged scalability and administration challenges resulting 
from a large number of subscriber routing tables, yet it's 
being rolled out by service providers such as Cable & Wireless, 
Global Crossing and others, in addition to Schlumberger. 

Cable & Wireless and Global Crossing provide circuits to 
Schlumberger, but the gas and petroleum company says it is not 
merely reselling those carriers' MPLS VPN services. 

Rouylou says Schlumberger has not experienced any scalability 
challenges with RFC 2547.

"I'm not saying that there will be no problem; I know that's 
one of the potential issues with MPLS," he says. "But we don't 
see that yet."

Schlumberger offers service-level agreements built around three 
classes of service: Standard, which provides SLAs for latency 
and availability; Premium, which measures latency, 
availability, throughput and packet drop; and Premium Plus, a 
multimedia service that measures jitter in addition to the 
parameters of Premium service.

Standard service provides no guarantees for dropped packets, 
while Premium and Premium Plus guarantee zero packet loss, says 
Clint Brown, marketing manager, Security Connectivity Services 
for Schlumberger NIS. Latency is reduced by 15% as subscribers 
move up in service class, he says, and 99.95% availability for 
the network core is guaranteed.

Schlumberger's end-to-end availability target is 99.7%, Brown 
says.

Schlumberger is offering committed information rates (CIR) but 
with no bursting capability. Instead, the company is offering 
bandwidth reservation with class of service whereby bandwidth 
above the CIR is provisioned within 24 hours and charged only 
when used.

Schlumberger is developing an algorithm to work with the MPLS 
traffic engineering and fast reroute capabilities of Cisco IOS 
routing software to reduce provisioning time to two hours, 
Brown says. "That really makes it an on-demand service," he 
says.

Subscriber access circuits into the DeXa.Net SPN include 
private lines; frame relay; ATM; Fast and Gigabit Ethernet; and 
very small aperture terminal satellite. 

The DeXa.Net SPN backbone operates at OC-3 and DS-3, which is 
slow by today's OC-48 and OC-192 standards, but it quickly can 
be upgraded as utilization approaches 50%, Brown says.

"The quickest way to go out of business is to have pipes lying 
empty," he says.

Currently, utilization on the DeXa.Net SPN backbone is 35%.

_______________________________________________________________
To contact Jim Duffy:

Jim Duffy is managing editor of The Edge, Network World's 
service provider equipment print section and Web channel. He 
has 15 years of high-tech reporting experience, including 10 
years at Network World. Previously, he was senior editor at 
Computer Systems News and associate editor/reporter at 
Electronic News and MIS Week. He can be reached at 
mailto:jduffy@nww.com.
_______________________________________________________________

Copyright Network World, Inc., 2002

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