The MPLS-OPS Archive[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index][Thread Index][Author Index][Subject Index] Re: FW: Energy giant offers MPLS VPNs
This is quite interesting as Schlumberger has just signed with Equant to provide it with a global VPN network...? Is the provider using a provider? possibly the same setup as Radianz? Rgds Jay _________________________________________________________________________________- 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 ------- The MPLS-OPS Mailing List Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://www.mplsrc.com/mplsops.shtml Archive: http://www.mplsrc.com/mpls-ops_archive.shtml Best Regards Jay Edmonds Service Manager Tel: +44 (0) 208 730 1259 Mob +44 (0) 7764 630513 Fax: +44 (0) 208 572 7953 CVS 222 1259 "The information in this email may be confidential, privileged and/or legally exempt from disclosure. 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