I hope there is someone from Schlumberger on the list as it would be interesting to hear details of the real size of the network, the expected coverage and proposed services.
In general, if a customer buys a couple of routers, Cisco claims a network infrastructure build-out.
Perhaps, Schlumberger is in need of Equant's (& C&W's circuits) coverage to reach certain sites. A vast majority of Equant's POPs are composed of Nortel's Passport MultiService Platform which can provide the L3 VPN reach and a competitive unmanaged L3 VPN.
>From: Jay.Edmonds@equant.com [mailto:Jay.Edmonds@equant.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, August 20, 2002 10:31 AM
>To: mpls-ops-request@mplsrc.com
>Cc: mpls-ops@mplsrc.com
>Subject: Re: [MPLS-OPS]: 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
>
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>Best Regards
> Jay Edmonds
>
>Service Manager
>
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