Case Study
Investor-Owned Utility
Consolidates IT and OT Networks
to Enable the Smart Grid
Summary
Company:
Investor-Owned Utility
Industry:
This Fortune 500, investor-owned utility develops energy infrastructure, operates utilities,
and provides related products and services to more than 30 million people.
Business Challenge
Gas and Electric Utility
Like many others in the energy sector, this utility knew it had a huge opportunity to
Business Challenge:
modernize its communications infrastructure. As with most power utilities, the company
Consolidate IT and operational
technology networks to increase
operating efficiencies and lay the
foundation for the next-generation
smart grid
maintained multiple networks—an information technology (IT) network for business
Technology Solution:
• MX480 and MX104 3D Universal
Edge Routers
• SRX5800 Services Gateway
• QFX3000-M QFabric System
requirements and an operational technology (OT) network that supports the delivery of
gas and electricity to customers.
Not satisfied with merely shifting its existing applications to a new MPLS network, it
wanted to consolidate networks so that IT and OT applications and services could
leverage the same infrastructure. If successful, the potential payoff was huge—increased
efficiency, scale, reliability, and security. It also would position the company to enable
the smart grid of the future, rich with industrial Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and
advanced applications. By challenging the status quo, it could build more than just a
network—it could unleash the revenue-generating potential of its network.
• Junos Space Network
Management and Junos API
But first, it needed to find a network that would meet the unyielding requirements
Business Results:
for critical infrastructure that delivered energy and related products and services to
• Converged IT and OT
applications on an IP/MPLS
network
millions customers.
• Cut operating expenses by 25
percent in 24 months
• Met exacting performance
requirements for teleprotection
The utility cut operating expenses by 25 percent in 24 months by
converging IT and OT networks on a Juniper IP/MPLS network.
Technology Solution
The power utility had the vision, courage, and expertise to be a leader in changing the
status quo for IT and OT networks. The company replaced its TDM/SONET networks
with an IP/MPLS network that could support converged voice, telepresence, corporate
data, and call center voice traffic. It selected Juniper Networks® MX Series 3D Universal
Edge Routers as the platform for its new core network. The family of MX Series routers
delivers industry-leading system capacity, density, and performance. The power utility
uses the MX480 router, which has 6 Tbps of capacity, as well as the MX104 router,
which has 80 Gbps of capacity. The carrier-grade MX Series router is powered by Juniper
Networks Junos® operating system for routing, switching, and security.
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Investor-Owned Utility Consolidates IT and OT Networks to Enable the Smart Grid
Junos OS offers a best-in-class MPLS feature set, so each
application and service on the network receives the appropriate
service level. With Junos OS, the utility can use label-switched
paths (LSPs), VPN routing, and virtual routing and forwarding
(VRF) routing instances as well as class of service. It also can
prioritize traffic and define service levels that provide different
delay, jitter, and packet loss characteristics to the applications
served by specific traffic flows of IPv4, IPv6, and MPLS traffic.
With Juniper, the utility could further simplify its network and
reduce complexity while strengthening security. Like most
organizations, the utility followed a defense-in-depth strategy
for perimeter security. But its existing design called for the use
of two firewall vendors and firewall pairs for each application.
The design inadvertently had created a sprawl that consumed
multiple full-time IT employees for daily maintenance, stranded
compute and storage resources, and ultimately created a brittle
environment for network operations.
The utility took a fresh approach to the age-old problem of
complex security. It turned to the Juniper Networks SRX5800
Services Gateway, which delivers high-performance security,
integrated threat intelligence, and the industry’s most scalable and
resilient platform. Over 100 pairs of firewalls were collapsed into six
pairs of SRX5800 gateways. Operational expenses and response
to the business user were improved by several orders of magnitude.
With a fully operational IP/MPLS network and an upgraded
security perimeter, the utility turned its attention to its data
centers. It selected Juniper Networks QFabric® System as
an efficient, single-tier data center networking design. In the
QFabric System, multiple distributed components work together
Case Study
Business Results
The power utility had the vision to converge its IT and OT
networks to unlock business value. It partnered with Juniper
to design and build an advanced network that would reduce
complexity, strengthen security, and deliver on that vision. The
utility saw demonstrable cost savings: a 25 percent reduction in
operating expenses in 24 months.
The utility also created a robust IP/MPLS network that could
support its OT applications and services. SONET, with consistent,
constant delay characteristics, traditionally has been the network
technology of choice for substation transport of mission-critical
applications like teleprotection. If a fault occurs on high voltages
lines, transformers, or other important pieces of an electrical
plant, the teleprotection system disables the faulty equipment
to protect the system from damage and ensures a secure and
uninterrupted supply of electricity.
The Juniper architecture is engineered for high availability,
resiliency, and capacity, making it an obvious choice to transport
OT applications and to become the next-generation transport
network for teleprotection and supervisory control and data
acquisition (SCADA) applications. The power utility proved that
with an exhaustive proof-of-concept test for teleprotection.
The results clearly demonstrated that the Juniper IP/MPLS
network provided performance levels equal to or better than
TDM/SONET in terms of stability and latency between protection
relays. In all cases, the one-way latency, network jitter, and
failover recovery times were well within the acceptable limits for
a protection relay system.
as a single switch to provide high-performance, any-to-any
The proof-of-concept consisted of seven distinct tests: network
connectivity, and management simplicity. With QFabric System,
baseline, traffic congestion, core router failure, core link failure,
the new data center network could support both legacy and
link failure between substation and core, router failure in
new compute nodes while functioning as a transit gateway to its
substation, and dual control center redundancy. End-to-end
storage area network (SAN) environment. The QFabric System
serial communications didn’t exceed 16.6 milliseconds (which
reduced latency and increased throughput.
equals one electric cycle in a 60 MHz grid), even under high
The IT team manages its Juniper routing, switching, and security
and deploys new network services using Juniper Networks Junos
Space Network Management Platform. Integration between Junos
Space and VMware vSphere has simplified operations and allows
IP addresses, VLANs, and security templates to be provisioned
rapidly. And by leveraging the Junos OS secure programming
interface, business units can self-provision resources.
network load. To ensure resiliency, communication paths must be
redundant and discrete. In testing, recovery from fault inception
to fault resolution occurred within 50 ms, the industry standard
recovery time for SONET. Jitter was also acceptably low—less
than 2 milliseconds from one circuit-to-packet device to another
circuit-to-packet device.
Next Steps
Converging IT and OT networks is the first step to building a
next-generation smart grid, which will allow the utility to better
serve its customers. This utility is well on its way with a smarter
network that supports the convergence of IT and OT systems
and provides a foundation for the many more devices and greater
flow of information that’s an essential part of creating smarter,
more energy-efficient cities, businesses, and homes.
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Investor-Owned Utility Consolidates IT and OT Networks to Enable the Smart Grid
Case Study
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