Chevron USA Re-configures Network to Hub-and-Spoke Profile Using Network Administration Software from JOIN Systems.

MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 22, 1998--JOIN Systems Inc. announced today that Chevron has selected and is implementing JOIN to manage IP addresses across the Chevron computing network in the United States. Chevron Information Technology Co., a division of Chevron USA, is installing JOIN in several hub locations that will eventually serve some 30,000 desktops.

Chevron Information Technology provides IT services to the rest of the company. Chevron is installing the hub-and-spoke configuration to its U.S. administrative computers, which will involve all U.S. systems except for those running refinery operations.

Michael Lewis, staff analyst who was responsible for software evaluation on the hub-and-spoke project, said the choice of JOIN and the Microsoft NT platform would help ensure standardization in the huge Chevron environment.

The standardization phase involves updating all workstations to Windows NT, and putting JOIN DHCP servers at hub sites (instead of having each hub's configuration decision made on a site-by-site basis). Lewis provides centralized support in most cases except to refineries or chemical plants, whose safety/security requirements cannot be reliant on an offsite network; these operations maintain their own services locally.

JOIN, which automates the IP addresses for networked computers, was the first commercial implementation of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol standard.

Network Topography

Chevron USA has installed the product on about 20 servers in about a dozen U.S. locations, plus one in London. The servers will eventually issue and manage IP addresses to as many as 30,000 clients from their U.S. bases in California, Texas, and Louisiana, plus the one in London. The hub locations have WAN links hooking them all together.

In the new configuration, individual satellite sites access the hubs, which in turn are connected by various links, typically T1. An individual hub may have one or more DHCP servers, to handle the DHCP needs of both the hub site itself and all the satellite sites coming in to it.

Chevron selected JOIN after an intense search of products that were designed with several different purposes: some products are bundled with a network server or operating system; others are built into network administration and management suites; yet others operate in a best-of-breed approach in standalone mode, as is the case with JOIN.

Lewis said, "One reason we selected JOIN was because of its ability to read and alter the lease database directly. This allows us to migrate end users from existing DHCP servers, often from different vendors, to JOIN without having the end user's IP address change. This is of great benefit to end users running server applications like X Windows."

Without JOIN, Lewis explained, "we'd have to perform some interesting technical acrobatics to set the same subnets on a new server. Otherwise, the server would start allocating addresses that were already in use. If we needed to move lots of subnets, it would be a tedious task."

Among the products which Lewis evaluated, "many were just announcements. JOIN has been out there for more than two years, and the DDNS capability was the clincher. When JOIN announced Dynamic DNS, it narrowed our choice to one."

Dynamically updating the name of the device with the IP address assigned to it is perhaps the most necessary of DHCP add-ons. Laird McCulloch, president of JOIN Systems, explained, "System administrators using DHCP alone are still required to keep logs for DNS updates. This task can be as nettlesome as DHCP administration used to be. DNS servers perform important name-to-IP address resolution, allowing users to remember the name of the computer they want to connect to, rather than the network address."

JOIN Systems is a network software development company specializing in DHCP, DNS, and other address management technologies that simplify TCP/IP network administration. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, JOIN Systems was formerly known as Competitive Automation.

CONTACT: Larry LaTarte, 650-321-4006 ([e-mail])