Construction Company Sets Hyper-Availability in Stone with Veeam

The Business Challenge

It was more than 150 years ago when an Irish immigrant named Timothy McCarthy began a lumber business in Michigan, building farmhouses and barns. Today the company is a multi-billion dollar construction firm and one of the largest and most diversified commercial building companies in America.

McCarthy would be proud to know the business he began has completed projects in nearly every state of the country he called home, including the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Texas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention building in Georgia and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in New York.

Each project generates a tremendous amount of data. In 2018, McCarthy measures data in terabytes (325), but by 2025 it will be measured in petabytes. Much of this data growth is attributed to construction equipment incorporating the Internet of Things, including sensor technology, global positioning systems and building information modeling. This technology brings a new level of visibility to building sites, keeping projects on budget and deadline.

Drone technology is a good example. Drones fly to the highest floors of a building under construction to monitor and track material usage. Laser scanning technology captures every detail of a building (down to the millimeter) and converts that information into a web-based, 3-D model so builders can view a site without ever stepping foot on it. They can see what’s under floors and behind walls, eliminating the chance of mistakes and delays.

“That’s just a portion of the data our 1,700 employees and hundreds of business partners rely on when they’re working on project sites across the country,” said Amanda Morgan, Systems Engineer at McCarthy. “If this information isn’t available, they can’t do their jobs.”

Data availability was McCarthy’s challenge. Recovering data could take up to 10 hours, putting project deadlines at risk and the company’s reputation on the line.

“Employees and partners don’t have time to wait around while we recover data,” Morgan said. “They need data at their fingertips so they can make important decisions. Data needs to be hyper-available, whether it’s measured in terabytes or petabytes.”

The Veeam solution

Veeam keeps McCarthy’s data hyper-available so projects stay on budget and complete on time. Veeam also provides enterprise scalability to accommodate McCarthy’s data growth.

“It’s incredibly comforting knowing your data is always available—in the moment and in the future,” Morgan said. “As we add more intelligent technology to our projects, we know Veeam’s got us covered.”

Veeam’s also got McCarthy covered on disaster recovery (DR) and return on investment (ROI).

“Everyone talks about how fantastic Veeam is, and now we know why,” Morgan said. We suffered a major system outage, and most of our data was unavailable. Veeam recovered it fast, so the entire company was up and running in 5 minutes. This happened two months after we deployed Veeam, so our ROI was instantaneous.”

Here’s what happened: The domain name system (DNS) crashed. Without DNS, Internet-based resources disappear. For enterprises with web and cloud-based content like McCarthy, DNS is a driving force of the business.

“We had no access to the Internet, email, web pages and internal resources,” Morgan said. “A situation like that could have crippled the business and cost us millions of dollars in lost projects, but Veeam saved us.”

Morgan said Veeam has saved McCarthy several times.

“When a colleague permanently deleted all of her email folders (50) and messages (1,900), I restored them in 3 minutes,” Morgan said. “It took longer to log into my computer than to restore several years’ worth of her correspondence.”

Another time, a partner lost access to drawings for a proposal he was preparing. This happened in the morning, and he was due to meet the client that afternoon.

“Kudos to Veeam for saving the day again,” Morgan said. “What’s even more impressive is that my teammates, who hadn’t been trained on Veeam, stepped in when I was out sick and restored the items in minutes. That’s how easy Veeam is to use.”

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows gets the credit for that recovery. It backs up McCarthy’s physical workloads to Microsoft Azure and restores them instantly, making data hyper-available.

“Hyper-availability is simple if you’re using Veeam,” Morgan said. “We know our data is safe and secure, whether it’s physical or virtual, and whether it’s measured in terabytes or petabytes. Veeam’s got us covered all around.”

The Results

• Hyper-available data supports thousands of building projects across the country
  Executing a successful construction project requires more than labor and materials. It requires hyper-available data so employees and partners have information at their fingertips when making important decisions.
• Enterprise scalability accommodates data growth due to intelligent technology
  Intelligent technology brings a new level of visibility to building sites, helping McCarthy deliver projects on time and on budget. Intelligent technology also generates an extraordinary amount of data. Veeam ensures data of any size is hyper-available.
• 5-minute recovery during a major system outage makes ROI instantaneous
  Two months after Veeam was deployed, the DNS crashed. Veeam restored data in 5 minutes, saving the day and making ROI instantaneous.