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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.

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