CAREL Industries SpA – headquartered in Brugine (Padova), Italy – is a multinational company working in the mechanical, engineering & manufacturing industries, selling HVAC/R control systems (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration).
Manufacturing
Supporting the company growth abroad resolving ties due to traditional datacenters and creating distributed ones with an hyperconvergent approach, to allow a simple and effective remote control and to reduce IT infrastructure complexities, improving performances in backup and Disaster Recovery
Nutanix 1000 and 8000 systems running Oracle databases and Oracle eBusiness suite
Processing power and storage capacity more than doubled with the Nutanix solution, simple and quick implementation and easy and effective management, while remote backup performances have been increased up to 300%
“With and investment equal to the cost of managing the previous systems, with Nutanix we have doubled computing power, standardizing as per the previously defined strategy. All this, doing innovation.”
CAREL is a multinational company, headquartered in Brugine (a province of Padova, Northern Italy), that designs, manufactures and sells solutions in the HVAC/R market (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration). With seven manufacturing plants, and more than 6,000 active clients worldwide - from Italy to Croatia, the United States and Asia, Australia, and China - CAREL has more than 1,350 employees and revenues that surpassed 250 million euros (284 million US dollars) in 2017. 13% of CAREL employees work in the area of Research and Development, where the Company invests about 6% of its consolidated turnover each year, investing another 4% in updating technology required for manufacturing processes.
In the last few years, CAREL has expanded its presence abroad, most notably with the opening of a new manufacturing plant in Croatia. But, with this new plant, came problems relating to information systems that needed to be resolved. It became necessary to setup a local datacenter that wasable to satisfy the needs of the site in Croatia, with remote support for the infrastructure that eradicated restrictions caused by the legacy approach and its high management costs.“The problem was complicated by the fact that it was mandatory to guarantee business continuity for the new plants,” says Gianluca Nardin, Information Technology Manager, ICT Technology Dept. for CAREL. This challenge was compounded by the geographical location of CAREL’s manufacturing plants (seven in total worldwide: three in Italy, one in China, one in the USA, one in Brazil and the most recent one, of course, in Croatia.) Gianluca added: “Each of them was connected to a local datacenter underpinned by diverse IT solutions and all with non-homogeneous standards”. It was necessary “…to remove the constraints imposed by the traditional datacenters and opt for a distributed solution,” stated Gianluca. Finally, CAREL has adopted some guidelines for the future that can be summarised by the slogan: ‘Cloud First’; i.e, a strategy that sees that it should “always build solutions based on the Cloud.”
After six months of researching the best possible solution for its needs, CAREL approached several IT solutions suppliers, and Nutanix’s solutions came out on top. Following various Proof-of-Concepts (PoC), CAREL decided to implement a solution based on two major clusters at its headquarters in Brugine. One of these clusters at the main Data Center, has to manage 100% of all of the company’s workloads; and the other cluster, at the Disaster Recovery site, must improve resilience and ensure service continuity for even the most critical workloads. Meanwhile,, remote branches have implemented Server Rooms based on the RoBO Nutanix solution. “To avoid the excessive costs derived from the traditional approach based on local datacenters that would have caused scalability problems, we decided to go with an innovative paradigm, consolidating the different datacenter technologies and adopting a hyperconvergent approach,” Gianluca explained.
In other words, CAREL has made a move away from the concept of the physical datacenter, to embrace a new vision of the distributed datacenter, instead. “To lower the operating risk, CAREL has a strategy to always start with a ‘limited experimental installation’. Plus, with Nutanix we’ve started with three nodes, with the view to grow this later,” Gianluca stated.
“The Nutanix implementation at the Croatian plant has been a success,” he added “so much so, that, little more than a year later, we have replicated it in Italy as well, with the perimeter and intervention times noticeably improved.” In fact, the results have been so reassuring that CAREL has now decided to use Nutanix for all its subsidiaries, thanks to its beneficial qualities, including “reliability, scalability and costs, such as a low Total Cost of Ownership.”
This Nutanix-focused strategy has enabled CAREL to succeed in ‘rejuvenating’ its information systems, doubling computing power and storage capacity, while implementing a network that performs even better than ever. “We are now enjoying ensured the greatest advantages, not just in the user satisfaction, but also through the improvements to the development and Disaster Recovery environments, that were heavily penalised and underused before. To that, I’d add simplicity and the consequent savings reached while managing the infrastructure. I’d say that a final summary comment may be: ‘maximum satisfaction’,” was Gianluca’s positive response.
With the success achieved to date, CAREL has decided to extend the project to the Group’s other manufacturing plants. “After the United States and Croatia, we have also completed deployment at the Brazilian plant and are now planning for the Chinese one.” Moreover, in the medium-to-long term, CAREL has decided to implement strategic developments, including the use of each remote datacenter as a Disaster Recovery site for other datacenters. Gianluca added: “This way, we greatly reduce recovery time in the case of issues.” After making and thoroughly testing a PoC, CAREL will implement the Nutanix hypervisor and continue to embrace the Cloud paradigm. To support these future developments, it is of the foremost importance to CAREL that Nutanix has the capability to always support its customers: “The support we’ve had from Nutanix has always been excellent, for their know-how, and for being very helpful. At the end of the day, I would definitely recommend Nutanix’s solution to others,” Gianluca stated.