| The 2,800 engineers and other professionals working on the new Jamnagar project must be able to exchange 2D and 3D representations of various parts of the refinery and collaborate on most of them in real time. In addition, they need access to software applications, data, and documents residing on servers around the world, so they can complete tasks ranging from design and engineering to finance to project management.
Bechtel’s Information Systems and Technology department (IS&T), working with Reliance, created a communications network just for this project. Riding atop Bechtel’s own network, its scale would rival enterprise networks serving large multinational companies.
Steve McIntyre, head of the IS&T group responsible for the network, likes to call the network a “paradigm changing, great honker of a project.” IS&T designed the infrastructure—the routers, switches, servers, and bandwidth on each link—as well as all of the performance and security specifications and mechanisms. IS&T has also tweaked major software applications, “stretching them to the max,” as McIntyre says.
The special Jamnagar network will be taken down after the project is finished, but McIntyre expects similar ones to be created for other massive multinational jobs. “The virtual company works,” he says, “and it allows us to use expertise from any of our offices on any project.”
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