Remote locations are the bane of networking professionals, and the North Sea brings new meanings to the word “remote.” For Canadian Natural Resources, Ltd., which is one of the largest independent crude oil and natural gas producers in the world, maintaining connectivity to its offshore oil rigs was an expensive necessity.

The company can’t afford to staff every platform with full-time IT support, and putting someone from headquarters on a helicopter or ferry every time a router goes down is both impractical and unreliable, given and long travel times and unpredictable weather. That opens the door to potentially weeks-long outages.

So CNRL recently turned its attention to the infrastructure itself for an answer.

With help from a Glasgow-based Cisco partner called Provista UK Ltd., the energy company embarked on an ambitious effort to overhaul its regional network to reduce the amount of manual work needed to address connectivity problems. The goal was to minimize the need for the IT department to maintain an on-site presence to troubleshoot outages.

Provista installed a set of controllers on each rig in a high-availability configuration in which operational data such as the number of connected routers is continuously synchronized from the primary device to the standby so as to ensure fast recovery in the event of an outage. Each pair hooks up to a central networking module at CNRL’s main Aberdeen location, where the company can enforce polices across the entire environment.

Thanks to the new setup, Provista says drilling workers can now afford to wait weeks for a fix without compromising their productivity or quality of life, which gives the IT organization a much larger window to resolve problems. That kills two birds with one stone: It takes pressure off the already thinly stretched operations team while addressing inevitable hiccups such as a storm.

Moreover, the Glasgow consultancy boasts that the implementation helped address CNRL’s secondary need to provide connectivity for visitors such as executives surveying the field. Admins can secure and regulate guest activity using Cisco’s built-in management software.

BBC photo