The retail industry is in a constant flux of change. With more customers looking to the web to make buying more convenient, it is more important than ever to maintain customer engagement and the ability to service those customers in-store.

Many applications such as, POS, digital displays, inventory management and self-checkout systems are dependent on the in-store infrastructure. Without continuous availability of these crucial applications your ability to serve your customers is greatly diminished or lost.

Enterprise Organizations look to network storage to ensure that applications and data are available across the in-store network and accessible from various terminals. Traditionally implementing this necessary evil was accomplished by implementing SAN solutions. Although SAN solutions fill the network storage need they pose the below concerns and challenges:

• Require high investment into acquisition, implementation, maintenance and IT management. Is there return on such a high investment?
• Your store servers have been consolidated through virtualization to simplify management, improve availability and reduce costs. Implementing a SAN solution will complicate that environment and increase costs…..substantially!
• SAN solutions are a single point of failure, your SAN goes down and you lose access to applications and data. Unless of course you implement two. Can you afford two SANs at each site?
• In the event of SAN failure, a physical presence on site is required to get back online. Meaning extended downtime, travel costs for central IT or costs for external IT and costs of repair….the list go on.
• They create dependency on hardware and software vendors.

So what are retail organizations doing to solve these challenges? Quite simply, more organizations are moving away from physical storage solutions and are implementing storage virtual appliances (SVAs) into their distributed virtualized sites. SVAs which have been developed for multi-site environments, such as StorMagic’s SvSAN, are ensuring availability of on-site applications and data without the need for additional hardware and without the high Capex/Opex.

How?

• SVAs are a software solution that enable High Availability in 2+ server environments: Learn more about how they work here: http://www.stormagic.com/storage_virtual_appliances.php
• StorMagic’s SvSAN enables simple set-and-forget 2 server HA environments without the need for any additional hardware. No additional Quorum host, no vCenter onsite, no switches.
• SvSAN is integrated into vCenter and enables single-pane-of-glass management of all your sites from Central IT.
• With scripted deployment functionality, SvSAN can be deployed across multiple sites with a few clicks and with minimal impact on your IT resources.

Learn how a large Big Box US retailer did this across over 2000 stores: http://www.stormagic.com/svsan_customer_profile.php