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Webinar – Analysis of IT at the Retail Store

May 28, 2013 in Branch Office, Multi-Site, Retail, Webinar

In this webinar, Tony Asaro, CEO and Founder of the INI Group, discusses the key findings of their recently published report, Analysis of IT at the Retail Store.

For this report, the INI Group conducted in-depth interviews with retailers to uncover the challenges, requirements, and strategies facing retail industry IT professionals and executives, including:

  • The importance of uptime;
  • The need for simple solutions to deploy and manage;
  • The complexity of centralized management;
  • The concern for IT cost across stores;
  • And more.

Access the Retail Report

As a thank you for registering, we are pleased to share the INI Group Report, Analysis of IT at the Retail Store which will be discussed in this webinar.

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Delivering Uptime – Analysis of IT at the Retail Store

May 8, 2013 in Branch Office, report, Retail

Retail is one of a handful of verticals whose revenue, brand, culture and customer experience is directly driven by their distributed sites/stores. Enterprise retail organizations with 1000’s of sites have an enormous challenge of maintaining each stores performance on these key impact points by ensuring that their staff are well trained, stores are well managed and that customers keep walking through the doors.

But what about downtime?

If the infrastructure fails, the store is no longer able to take orders, the brand is impacted and you potentially loose customers and future business to competitors. This is why retail is making substantial investments into their store infrastructures to reduce the risk of downtime. But how are they doing this?

In a recent report from the INI Group (Industry Insights: Analysis of IT At The Retail Store) it is discussed that some organizations are centralizing their data and applications which opens the risk of mass downtime if the datacenter goes down. Others are introducing heavy set systems on-site which is a high CAPEX / OPEX investment but still leaves susceptibility to extended periods of downtime.

However, most organizations are looking to Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) to decentralize their store applications/data and centralize their IT and support. VSA’s are helping enterprise organizations in many verticals to create streamlined yet robust distributed infrastructures which are managed centrally and require substantially less CAPEX and OPEX investment.

“If it took one week to get an IT system up and running, it could take 5,000 business days to complete the same project at all [1,000] sites. Performing a single deployment every day, it would still require 2.7 years to complete the project.”

In this report, the INI group discusses how enterprise retail organizations are approaching VSA solutions and what their key requirements are to ensure their store stay online.

Download the Report Here

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The Retail Store Infrastructure: Less is More

April 29, 2013 in Branch Office, Multi-Site, Retail, Storage, SvSAN

The mindset towards onsite IT has changed drastically. Over the years there has been a gradual move away from the traditional hefty store IT infrastructure with more investment into implementing streamlined environments which are de-centralized in application control but centralized in management.

For retail IT, ensuring uptime of critical applications across their stores is their number 1 priority as application downtime directly impacts the bottom line. But unfortunately very often more time is spent putting out metaphorical fires than fireproofing.

This is why enterprise IT are turning to Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) as an alternative to or to replace their remote site Storage Area Networks. SAN solutions provide the shared storage required to ensure availability of data and applications but can create more fires than they prevent, because:

  • You virtualized your store environments for simplicity and improved management. SAN solutions re-complicate these environments and require specialist storage expertise to manage.
  • SAN solutions are a high CAPEX & OPEX investment which over time requires additional upgrades and eventual retirement.
  • Although a SAN solution is implemented to provide availability of data/applications, it is a single point of failure in the environment. 2 SAN solutions would be required to remedy this and could almost double your CAPEX.

In a recent Retail Technology Study, RIS news detail how retailers are evolving to keep up with the winds of change. As part of the study, RIS explains that as the retail technology stack evolves, so does the architecture approach to software.

StorMagic’s VSA solution, SvSAN, achieves affordable application uptime, shared storage, high availability and reliability while eliminating the need for physical storage networks at your retail stores.

StorMagic’s SvSAN is ideal for remote sites because of the following:

-          Simple to use and manage.

-          Significantly reduced capital costs

-          Automated, fast and easy deployment over dozens, hundreds and thousands of remote sites

-          vSphere integration providing single pane of glass management across all remote sites

-          Low ongoing operational costs

-          Small footprint

-          Hardware independence

-          Excellent application performance

-          True 2 server High Availability (HA) without local quorum server requirement

 

Retail Customer Brief

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Fresh oil for the StorMagic machine

April 3, 2013 in Multi-Site, News, Storage, SvSAN

Recently StorMagic appointed Sonny Bennett to direct product management at a critical point in the company’s rapid growth. Sonny bring over 14 year of experience as a storage architects and takes a senior role in defining product requirements for enterprise organizations with multiple distributed sites.

“It is critical that our products address the specific challenges of branch-office environments, including availability, performance, serviceability and centralized management,” explains Hans O’Sullivan, CEO of StorMagic.

StorMagic is experiencing continued success because of a significant demand for enterprise-class virtual storage for virtual server environments. In recent news, a big-box retailer saved over $10m on hardware alone by implementing StorMagic’s SvSAN across their 2200+ stores instead of other competitive virtual storage appliance (VSA) solutions.

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Enable Retail Distributed Store Uptime with Virtualization and Virtual Storage Appliances

March 20, 2013 in Branch Office, Multi-Site, Retail, Storage, SvSAN, Whitepaper

Virtualization  helps drive down the cost of IT by consolidating servers, reducing maintenance costs and lowering management overhead. Just as importantly, advanced features make it possible to achieve high availability for critical store applications. With high availability, applications that support revenue generation and applications that support efficiency, cost containment and risk management are always available. It’s no surprise, then that InformationWeek.com, using data from a recent IDC study, highlighted virtualization as the top priority for CIO’s.

Employees, partners, and customers may access an organization’s applications from virtually anywhere: from the office, from home, or on the road. And they expect the applications to be available, regardless of where the applications run, whether from a centralized corporate data center, from a cloud service, from a remote site or from some combination of the three.

CIO’s and IT administrators responsible for retail IT operations face unique challenges at the store level that have, until recently been barriers to delivering high availability. These barriers are:

  • High hardware and software acquisition costs
  • High maintenance costs
  • The lack of onsite skilled IT staff

Shared storage is a key enabling technology for high availability and an absolute requirement for advanced availability features. Shared storage has also however, been a prime contributor to high acquisition costs, high maintenance costs, and the need for onsite, highly-skilled IT staff.

Download this informative whitepaper to learn how virtual storage appliances are enabling retail organizations to deliver uptime in their distributed store environments.

Download the Whitepaper

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Enable Store Availability So You Can Focus on Your Infrastructure Development

March 7, 2013 in Multi-Site, Retail, SvSAN

StorMagic understands the challenges of running business-critical applications at remote sites, especially for large regional or national retail organizations with many locations and no IT resources at the store level.

So how do you achieve affordable application uptime, shared storage, high availability and reliability while eliminating the need for physical storage networks at your retail stores? For infrastructure management teams, implementing network storage in-store ensures availability of business applications, but the expense is too high.

StorMagic’s SvSAN is ideal for remote sites because of the following:

  • Simple to use and manage.
  • Significantly reduced capital costs
  • Automated, fast and easy deployment over dozens, hundreds and thousands of remote sites
  • vSphere integration providing single pane of glass management across all remote sites
  • Low ongoing operational costs
  • Small footprint
  • Hardware independence
  • Excellent application performance
  • True 2 server High Availability (HA) without local quorum server requirement

Read how a big box retailer with over 2200 locations is deploying SvSAN to dozens of sites weekly with an estimated $10m in cost savings. Learn More

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Virtual Storage Appliance For Distributed Sites

February 11, 2013 in Branch Office, Multi-Site, Storage, SvSAN

Author: Colm Keegan, Lead Analyst at Storage Switzerland LLC.

Shared storage, whether it be networked attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN), has become an essential component of any IT environment – large or small. While the cost of shared storage technology has dropped significantly over the last 10 years the costs of physical storage solutions are still prohibitive in achieving remote site redundancy. In addition to high Capex and Opex costs, the complexity of implementing and managing physical storage solutions can be daunting for even the most seasoned IT professionals.

In most instances the storage capacity available internal to the physical hosts will suffice for supporting on-site applications. The challenge for organizations managing multiple remote sites is that physical storage solutions require high capital investment for acquisition, deployment, management and maintenance. These physical solutions re-introduce complexity into virtualized environments and are a single point that introduces higher risk of extended downtime.

More

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VTUG Winter Warmer 2013 – Attendee Interviews

February 7, 2013 in Events, Multi-Site, News, Storage, SvSAN

In January the StorMagic team spent their day at the VTUG Winter Warmer at the Gillette Stadium in Foxborough exhibiting the virtual storage appliance (VSA) SvSAN and holding sessions on how SvSAN is eliminating the need for network storage to achieve remote site redundancy.

While there we had to take the opportunity to interview the attendees on how their remote sites are setup and what the impact is on the business when those systems go down.

And here it is.

Learn more about how SvSAN is enabling affordable remote site redundancy while eliminating the need and single point of failure of physical storage solutions at StorMagic.com

 

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Reinventing Network Storage for Remote Site Redundancy

February 4, 2013 in Multi-Site, Retail, Storage, SvSAN, video, Webinar

Although the retail sector has a lower probability of store downtime, it does suffer from a higher cost of downtime per hour. This high cost of downtime is a result of employee dependency on the in-store infrastructure.

For infrastructure management teams, implementing network storage in-store ensures availability of business applications. However implementing SAN storage in business and mission-critical retail locations actually increases risk because of its inherent complexity. Additionally, the capital and management costs make no business sense for these environments as they raise concerns and challenges such as:

-          High Capex and Opex associated with acquisition, management and implementation of physical solutions across multiple stores/sites,

-          Physical storage solutions re-introduce complexity into virtualized environments.

-          As a single point of failure if the storage fails your site goes down.

-          Potential extended downtime as physical solutions require on-site IT for hardware failure resolution

The combination of server virtualization and virtual storage appliances (VSA) changes the landscape providing a solution that is simple to use and cost effective while still providing high availability.

In this recent webinar we discuss how StorMagics SvSAN has reinvented network storage for retail environments:

-          Simple to implement over dozens, hundreds and thousands of remote locations

-          Ease of ongoing management and support across remote locations

-          Changes the business economics including capex and opex

-          Ensures in-store application availability cost effectively

-          Examination of a real world use case of a major retailer with over 2,000 locations

 

Watch Now: http://www.stormagic.com/Webinars/webinar_2013_01_30.php

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Eliminating the Need for Shared Storage in Distributed Retail Stores

January 16, 2013 in Multi-Site, Retail, Storage, SvSAN

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

 

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