Carrier Global Corporation boosts productivity and gains peace of mind with Veeam

As a world leader in refrigeration along with heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), Carrier’s solutions help keep homes and offices comfortable and enable the safe delivery of fresh foods and medications to people all over the globe.

Carrier operates in over 160 countries and has manufacturing facilities spanning APAC, EMEA, and North America. To meet global demand for its refrigeration and HVAC solutions, the company’s manufacturing operations run almost seven days a week.

 “Any interruption to manufacturing has the potential to be extremely disruptive and costly for the business. Because of that, the company strives to ensure that IT solutions supporting production lines and other key business processes are always available,” said Giuseppe Larovere, Associate Director, Global Hosting Operations On-Premise at Carrier Corporation

Carrier operates a shared services model to deliver IT capabilities to its global business units. From its central data center, the company operates an on-premises estate of 1,500 virtual and physical servers to support its mission-critical services.

Previously, Carrier relied on several different backup and recovery tools to protect its on-premises environments. However, the combination of tools and configurations meant it was practically impossible to deliver an accurate, uniform recovery time objective (RTO) across their systems. Additionally, the decentralized legacy tools the company previously used were prone to errors and carried inconsistent levels of security. This heightened system risks and left data potentially unrecoverable in a disaster recovery (DR) scenario.

“Our main goals are to ensure high levels of availability and security, and, if issues do occur, to restore our data and recover our systems as fast as possible,” said Larovere. “After several incidents and near-misses with our previous toolset, we decided that it was time for a new approach. We aimed to replace our fragmented backup systems with a modern, secure, centralized data protection solution.”

To bring greater resilience and security to its global IT infrastructure, Carrier selected Veeam Data Platform.

“We chose Veeam for several reasons,” said Larovere. “Some of our teams were already using Veeam on a small scale, and their highly positive feedback on Veeam Data Platform was a strong signal that we were on the right track. After Veeam gave us a demo of the solution, we were convinced it offered everything we were looking for: Ease of use, security, reliability and cost-effectiveness. Another big plus with Veeam was the fact that the solution is hardware agnostic, allowing us to break free from costly dependence on specific hardware vendors.”

While working with a Veeam partner, Carrier deployed Veeam Data Platform to act as the central data protection solution for its entire on-premises environment. Today, the company uses Veeam to safeguard over 1.5 PB of data.

“We refreshed our data protection landscape from end to end, including the deployment of brand-new server and storage infrastructure,” said Larovere. “Veeam supported us every step of the way, from presales all the way through implementation and beyond. The support we received from Veeam was excellent; the team went out of their way to make sure we were comfortable and self-sufficient with the solution.”

With Veeam, Carrier has succeeded in building a unified approach to protecting its critical business systems. The company can now manage backup jobs for the entire global enterprise from a single point of control, which enables consistent and timely recovery for all systems.

“We’ve shrunk our RTO by around 30% across the board,” said Larovere. “At the same time, we’ve boosted the success rate for our backups from around 84% to over 99%, which gives us peace of mind that we can always recover from our backups if the need arises.”

By using Veeam’s automated backups and monitoring dashboards, Carrier also significantly reduces time spent on day-to-day management tasks.

“We hardly need to touch Veeam Data Platform, which is saving us one full-time equivalent a week,” said Larovere.

Carrier is always looking for ways to strengthen its information security posture. By deploying Veeam Service Provider Console, the company can accelerate and streamline patching and remediation activities for its Veeam solutions.

“If we need to close a vulnerability on one of our backup servers, Veeam Service Provider Console enables us to set up the patching job with just a couple of clicks,” said Larovere. “We’ve now accelerated the patching process by 98%, which helps us ensure that our environment is always hardened against the latest cyberthreats.”

Today, Carrier continues to innovate its approach to data protection. The company is working with Veeam to implement immutable backups to add an additional line of defense against ransomware and other cyberthreats.

“We see that encryption and immutability are powerful tools to protect our mission-critical data,” said Larovere. “Veeam is so much more than just another backup solution. It has become an integral part of our security framework, helping us to ensure the highest level of data protection across our global business.”

• Increases backup success rate from 84% to over 99%
  “Since we deployed Veeam, we never worry about if we’ll be able to restore from one of our backups,” said Larovere. “Whether we are recovering individual files or entire systems, Veeam gets the job done every time.”
• Saves one full time equivalent a week on manual administration tasks
  Carrier has replaced fragmented manual tools and processes with a unified, automated solution from Veeam, which saves valuable time that can be redirected to activities such as cybersecurity.
• Cuts costs by eliminating dependence on proprietary hardware
  Carrier can deploy Veeam on its infrastructure of choice, enabling it to break free of the high hardware costs associated with its previous backup tools.