Bethlehem Steel net upgrade combines speed, savings

BALTIMORE - Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point manufacturing plant this month is due to complete a $1.1 million upgrade to its campus-area network that can only be described as a win-win situation. Not only will the plant's end users receive a 10-fold increase in bandwidth at their desktops, but its bean-counters will reap immediate savings.

That's why Bethlehem Steel is moving ahead with the upgrade despite filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in September. Bethlehem Steel is among many U.S. steelmakers caught in financial straits because of low-priced imports, escalating pension costs and an excess supply of steel products worldwide.

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Nonetheless, the economics of the network upgrade here are so strong that Bethlehem Steel is moving ahead with a similar upgrade at its other major plant in Burns Harbor, Ind. that will be completed next year.

"Our new lease cost is less" than for the previous technology, says Thomas Conarty, senior vice president for procurement, information technology and logistics. "It's a no-brainer."

Bethlehem Steel officials say they slashed $160,000 from the campus-area network's total cost of ownership last year by migrating its backbone from FDDI to Gigabit Ethernet and its local-area networks from Ethernet to Fast Ethernet. The estimated savings for 2001 are $210,000, and the estimated savings for 2002 are $140,000.

Meanwhile, the high-speed network is enabling new applications including real-time video for environmental and safety monitoring as well as a security architecture that uses a virtual LAN topology to isolate industrial traffic from general office traffic.

Bethlehem Steel officials hope the new high-speed networks at its Sparrows Point and Burns Harbor plants will help the company emerge stronger from its Chapter 11-mandated restructuring.

"If we allowed our networks to deteriorate, and if we didn't lead in this area, it would hurt our chances of a successful plan of reorganization," Conarty says.

Bethlehem Steel teamed up with Electronic Data Systems and Cisco Systems on the Sparrows Point campus-area network upgrade, which began in March 2000.

Bethlehem Steel already leased from AT&T approximately 17 miles of fiber optic cable that snakes around the six mills, steelmaking areas and office buildings located on this 2,300-acre plant. Completed in 1997, the fiber-optic network had a 100M bit/sec FDDI backbone, 100M bit/sec Fast Ethernet inside the mills and 10M bit/sec Ethernet to the desktop.

"The refresh here is very much in keeping with a strategy we first set out in 1996-1997, when we put fiber-optic cabling into this facility," Conarty says. "We planned to upgrade the electronic components as technology changed and opportunities arose. This was one of those electronic upgrades."

Bethlehem Steel wanted to upgrade the network to meet the information-sharing demands brought on by recent modernization efforts here, including construction of the most modern cold sheet mill in North America. The new campus-area network features a Gigabit Ethernet backbone and 100M bit/sec Fast Ethernet both inside the mills and to the desktop.

"Because of all the capital improvements here, there were myriad network challenges and opportunities that came up," Conarty says. We needed to upgrade "because of the robust nature of the network, its need to operate on a 7-by-24 basis, and the minimum number of skilled people we have. A lot had happened since we laid the fiber backbone."

Altogether, the plant added seven Cisco 6506 routers and replaced 72 switches with Cisco 2924 Catalyst Switches. The plant also added six Catalyst 4006 Switches and 15 Catalyst 5505 Switches. Bethlehem Steel leased all of the equipment.

"Our philosophy whenever possible is to lease," Conarty says. "We want to stay current from a technology perspective and meet the needs of the business."

Because of the high demand for availability and inherent risks associated with steelmaking such as fires and other physical damage, the network is set up to be fully redundant with every node having two possible routes. Each mill has a router and hot standby switch.

"Our network has to be robust," says Senior Technical Consultant Bob Kline. "We have to recover in two seconds or less from a cable cut."

One interesting feature of the network is its use of a virtual LAN topology to isolate traffic. The plant has four logical networks--industrial control, SCADA [Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition], general office and video--that all run on the same fiber optic backbone. Using an approach dubbed "integrated isolation," Bethlehem Steel ensures the security of the various types of communication without requiring encryption.

"We can have four, five, six different VLANs, but have them totally integrated for efficiency," says Chris Ryan, an automation engineer.

Company officials say one of the most exciting new applications on the campus-area network is real-time video. They've set up 12 industrial-strength cameras throughout the plant that provide real-time video feeds to the company's intranet. Employees can view the video from any location. Key uses are safety and environmental monitoring.

"Researchers at our R&D facility [in Pennsylvania] can monitor practices and change practices" for safety or efficiency reasons, Ryan says.

The intranet is one of the key applications running across the campus-area network. Overall, the network supports 1,250 PCs and several hundred process computers used in manufacturing. About a quarter of the plant's employees have their own desktop PCs; the rest access the intranet via kiosks.

Remote access to the campus-area network is locked down for security reasons.

"Steelmaking is an inherently dangerous business," Conarty explains. "The networks are configured so only a couple people can modify them. It would be a disaster if we allowed people to do that from their dens. We do more to secure our networks through the tightness of our process than we could ever do through [software.]"

A team of four EDS employees operate and manage the campus-are network, using Hewlett-Packard's Open View and CiscoWorks software. The general office network runs Windows NT.

Bethlehem Steel regularly upgrades all of its campus-area networks. In addition to the Sparrows Point and Burns Harbor upgrades going on now, the company recently upgraded a plant in Buffalo, N.Y. and plans to upgrade two other plants in Pennsylvania.

"We use a lead/follow strategy, where the sites leapfrog each other as we do network upgrades," Conarty says.

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