Juniper drills into India’s oil industry, finds racks to fill

Nation's second-largest petroleum producer to deploy switches, firewalls

Juniper Networks scored a win in India’s oil industry this week after the country’s second-largest, state-owned petroleum producer, Oil India, tapped the networking stalwart to modernize its datacenter and campus infrastructure.

The efforts are part of an ongoing initiative by the Indian Government unveiled during the country’s 75th independence day last year, which seeks to achieve complete energy independence by 2047. The sweeping initiative includes provisions for electrifying India’s rail system; waste recycling; hydrogen production; and, luckily for Juniper, the rapid expansion of oil and natural gas infrastructure throughout the country’s 28 states.

As a piece of this much broader mission, Oil India plans to deploy Juniper’s switches and firewalls throughout its datacenter and campus networks to support greater degrees of automation across the company’s 2,000 kilometers of oil and gas pipelines. Additionally, the companies claim these upgrades will support the use of autonomous drones and video analytics functionality to deter illegal activities, detect and contain leaks, and prevent environmental damages.

“Having a Juniper network fabric in our datacenters and offices gives Oil India improved business resiliency, greater flexibility and choices to deliver better digital experiences to our employees and customers,” Chandan Kumar Barman, deputy GM of IT for Oil India, said in a canned statement.

The partnership will see Oil India deploy Juniper’s QFX5120 switches in its flagship datacenter, located at its Duliajan Assam headquarters. The appliances support layer 2-3 switching and sport up to 48 ports of 25 Gbit/sec networking as well as multiple 100 Gbit/sec aggregation ports.

Meanwhile, for campus switching, Oil India is deploying a combination of QFX5120 and QFX5110 switches for its core network, and Juniper’s PoE-equipped EX4300 for the distribution layer in a spine-leaf topology.

For routing and security, Oil India is using Juniper’s SRX4200 Service Gateways in conjunction with its Security Director, and Juno Space Network Director software suites.

Oil India is also leaning on Juniper’s automation tools in a bid to offset the operational costs of managing its network. Automation remains a key area of investment for the networking giant, following Juniper’s acquisition of Mist in 2019 and intent-based networking vendor Apstra in 2020.

Finally, to securely interconnect its datacenters, disaster recovery facility, and campus networks, Oil India is taking advantage of EVPN-VXLAN fabrics, which are natively supported on the aforementioned appliances. The technology enables users to treat physically disparate branches and datacenters as a single interconnected network.

"Previously, if there was a fiber cut, which is not uncommon, the office could lose connectivity," Manas Bordoloi, core technical team member at Oil India, said in a statement. "With a campus fabric from Juniper, we have the network resiliency required to support our business operations." ®