Hi from what you have written and from my experience in my project I am giving you this reply.
Many servers maintains firewall so that not everyone can connect to it. Probably firewall, of the database server to which you are trying to access from development server, might have been opened for port 1521 for your development server and the same is not opened up for the production server (does it make any sense!). You may contact your system administrators to discuss the firewall issues.
Hope this helped you!