BNSF became one of the first companies in the railway industry to deploy an extensive wireless network and automate the management of its complex IT infrastructure in 2005.

Opsware Network Automation System was deployed at the company’s Network Operations Center before BNSF upgraded its network of Nortel routers and deployed Cisco wireless equipment to support the wireless business initiative.

In the past, network engineers would log into each device manually to make configuration changes. Using the Opsware solution, Britz and his team automated password and SNMP community string management, deployment of access control lists, and configuration change tracking. Now changes can be pushed out as a batch and BNSF can use Opsware’s policy compliance manager to ensure that all deployed changes match the company’s required security and compliance policies.

Britz and the BNSF Technology Service team evaluated at least five automation solutions before choosing Opsware Network Automation System. The Opsware solution was chosen because of its comprehensive support for Nortel device drivers and Opsware's proven network management expertise.

"Automation will win every time over manual IT management as we begin to roll out new services and the network becomes more complex. With Opsware, we will handle configuration updates in milliseconds, compared to the minutes or hours that it took to configure systems manually”

Greg Britz,
Network Operations Manager,
BNSF Railiway

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