Telecommunications | CapRock Communications

Proteus Means No More Suffering with Spreadsheets for CapRock Communications

BACKGROUND

Celebrating 25 years in business, CapRock Communications is a premier global satellite communications provider for the off-shore energy, maritime, construction and mining industries, as well as for disaster relief and government applications. The company utilizes the latest field- proven satellite technologies to deliver highly reliable managed communication services for broadband networking, real-time video and digital telephony to the world’s harshest and most remote locations. CapRock delivers on its promise to be the market’s reliability leader by leveraging “best of breed” partnerships, technical expertise and a robust self-owned and operated global infrastructure that includes four international teleports and ten regional operation centers across the U.S., Central and South America, Europe, West Africa and Asia Pacific.

OPPORTUNITY

CapRock employs a highly qualified engineering and management staff to design, develop and deploy satellite communication projects worldwide. Providing extremely reliable satellite communication services is a complex task, requiring precise systems engineering and the careful integration of telecommunication assets both in orbit and on the ground. The provision and maintenance of DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management to support their business is the responsibility of Ron Long, Director of Engineering, and his staff. Members of the team had become accustomed to spending a great amount of time performing manual updates and edits in order to ensure the uninterrupted availability of the DNS services and the accuracy/status of thousands of IP address allocations. According to Wesley Phillips, ATSS Engineer at CapRock, using spreadsheets to manually allocate, track and manage the company’s network components (as well as those of all of its customers) was becoming an overwhelmingly tedious task for the team. CapRock searched for a next generation networking solution that would put an end to the nightmare of having to manage the entire network, one administrator at a time, using outmoded spreadsheets.

SOLUTION

Their research led them to evaluate and quickly purchase Proteus from BlueCat Networks. Proteus is an Enterprise IP Address Management (IPAM) Appliance that allows administrators to build, model, verify and deploy error-free DNS and DHCP configurations. The appliance also manages an unlimited number of IP name spaces and devices on a global scale. As such, Proteus now plays an integral part in CapRock’s Network Management and Service Provision teams.

IMPACT

Using Proteus’ sophisticated web-based management console, all data across the company’s intricate and geographically disperse network is now housed in single centralized database. This means that information on each and every customer’s modem, hub, switch, VoIP telephone number, or other device on the network – and every associated IP address – is available to authorized CapRock users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year…from anywhere in the world. With Proteus’ intuitive conceptual views of complex network topology and a user-friendly graphic user interface (GUI), CapRock’s network engineers can easily work collaboratively on customer projects from various remote locations. Network administration, monitoring and troubleshooting can now be accomplished quickly and efficiently by any number of administrators concurrently viewing and managing their networks in real-time, thereby eliminating the use of one-dimensional, error-prone spreadsheets.

No more spreadsheets, no more errors, no more collaboration or deployment issues: these advanced network management capabilities made Proteus a welcome addition to the CapRock Communications team.