Refining Intelligence

With the presence of over 6,466 retail outlets and 2,071 LPG

distributors throughout the country, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL)

is India's leading integrated petroleum refining and marketing company in

India. The PSU is involved in downstream oil refining and marketing activities.

Its corporate office and refinery (Mahul) are at Mumbai and another refinery is

at Cochin.

The need for IT infrastructure is immense. BPCL has over 300

servers running various applications like SAP, MS Mail, Intra-link applications,

E-biz, and Petro-card to name a few. As of today, around 325 locations work on

SAP.

In Brief

Client: Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL) Vendor: Tyco Electronics AMP Netconnect System Integrator: Wipro Infotech Location: Corporate Data Center at Sewree Implementation: Intelligent cabling, MRJ21 Installation Time: Under three months

Critical Mess



The lifeline runs through the corporate data center (CDC) at Sewree and
disaster recovery site at Greater Noida. These critical installations house over

500 primary servers for all applications, with some applications required to be

running 24x7.

The CDC, established around 1960, went through several upgrades.

In 1997, the data center cabling was upgraded to Cat5. "With thousands of

cables running through the data center, it was no less than a mess tracing which

went where," says NM Thombare, chief manager, IIS Services, BPCL.

Thombare's team of network and infrastructure managers had a

tough task at hands, managing over hundred cables per rack. "It would be a

nightmare if a cable was plugged out accidentally. With SAP application running

round the clock, we couldn't afford a downtime of even a second," says

Thombare. Lack of proper documentation and paper work on installations was

another problem plaguing the data center.

With inevitable expansion and additions of more retail outlets

and office locations, BPCL had to take a hard look at its lifeline, the

structured cabling. "Our top priority was to have a clean and orderly CDC

with lesser cables to manage, an easy documentation process, and most

importantly, future proof," says Thombare about their criteria while

looking for a structured cabling solution

Antidote



The requirement was to build a data center where human interface would be
minimal with redundancy at all levels, including electricity, LAN points, power

distribution, network, air conditioning, and a secure camera surveillance

system.

BPCL needed a cable network system with robust connectivity and

less complexity in terms of cable bunching in the server farm area; excellent

cable management and more importantly, a system which could generate alarms in

case of unauthorized disconnection/ access in a simple email or text mode, so

that complaints could be attended much faster.

Choosing over other cabling vendors, BPCL went for AMP

Netconnect's intelligent infrastructure management (IIM) solution that

promised real-time monitoring of infrastructure, reducing incidences of faulty

connections and efficient documentation process. "Even though Tyco was

comparatively costlier than other vendors, we chose its cabling solution,

impressed by its full feature-rich product heritage, including the intelligent

cabling solution, Amptrac IM. The additional features in its products were just

what we wanted in terms of saving space and reducing cables," says Thombare.

Designing cabling system



The systems were designed on the plug-and-go solution for copper and fiber;

incorporating intelligent cabling solution (Amptrac IM). The topology suggested

was the distributed network architecture. "During designing, we considered

the minutest of details like size of the data center, number of servers, type of

servers, and usage," says Milind Kadam, system application engineer and

sales manager (West Region), Tyco Electronics.

By placing a consolidation point, the system integrator, Wipro

Infotech, was able to save time and space for cable deployment in the data

center. Speaking on the advantages, Kadam says, "Keeping in mind the ease

of use, we placed racks that can be moved as and when required with ease, we

achieved more utilization of parts by using MRJ21."

Unlike the conventional termination, there was no fixed cabling.

The plug-and-play option ensured flexibility to the data center managers to add

more ports as and when required. This option also ensured the project completion

within a short period of less than three months.

"We suggested plug-and-play solution with fiber patch cord,

which makes it faster to deploy and easier to maintain and use. We highlighted

the advantages of MRJ21 over other products like RJ21, which translates into

lesser cable density and lots of spacing with efficient cooling," says

Kadam.

With intelligent cabling system, BPCL's data center

administrator was able to simplify the documentation process and remotely

monitor the physical layer. Reduced human interface drastically cut down network

downtime related to physical layer issues, and what's more, the BPCL data

center is future ready with minimum upgrade required for the next five years.

Malovika Rao





malovikar@cybermedia.co.in