Energy Company Solves InterBuilding Communications Problem with NETSCOUT

The company opened a new corporate headquarters campus in the US that brings together thousands of employees from all the multiple business units, in a world-class facility designed to foster communication and collaboration. The employees are tasked with addressing global business challenges, and the campus IT network is designed for high volumes of network traffic between the many buildings and with the corporate data center. Once all the campus buildings were fully staffed, the company experienced inter-building communication problems. Since the campus houses many business units, it is critical that they each have reliable access to all the other buildings, as well as the the datacenters, to communicate and share systems. IT needed a simple way to verify and monitor this complex grid of access points. After a vendor completed a fiber upgrade, users in some buildings were experiencing intermittent degradations with some applications. It was difficult to pinpoint the problem because only certain buildings’ traffic was affected at certain times. This negatively impacted user’s productivity when they could not access a critical application, while users in other buildings could access.

This multi-billion dollar, major Fortune 500 enterprise is a century-old, multi-national oil and gas company. With tens of thousands of world-wide employees, this company is one of the largest integrated refiners, marketers of petroleum products, and chemical manufacturers in the world, producing essential commodities that include fuels, lubricants, and specialty chemical products. The complex design of multiple data centers, voice and video communications in every office, and dozens of interconnected manufacturing & research facilities makes their enterprise network a critical part of the company’s day-to-day operation and business success.