Business Challenge
This supermarket chain has been in business for well over 50 years and one of its many goals is to provide efficient and reliable services to its customers. Having virtualized its point-of-sale (POS) infrastructure, the company now needed to virtualize their storage in order to further reduce costs, increase efficiency and to eliminate the single point of failure (SPOF) their current SAN solution represented. High availability and high performance to support various applications was priority and to deliver on this, it required a technology infrastructure that was:
- simple, efficient, fully redundant, flexible and cost effective
- able to accommodate distributed IT services in its 150 stores and 10 distribution centers across Europe
- reliable and provides high availability for smooth running of its operations
- managed centrally as they had no local IT resource.
Solution
Several VSAs were evaluated, but the only solution that outperformed all others in the customer’s type of environment, and produced benefits above and beyond its existing infrastructure solution, was StorMagic SvSAN.
Why StorMagic
For this customer, SvSAN delivers a centralized management model leveraging integration with VMware vCenter to ensure the infrastructure is simple and scalable enough for the company’s highly distributed environment.
Deploying SvSAN was simple and automated, enabling IT staff to handle the job easily without involving any storage specialists. Updates are similarly applied, without any operational disruption.
By reducing the number of servers from three (two servers and one SAN) to two per site, the company estimates that within four years, savings representing €1 million could be realized, due to lower purchase costs and energy savings. It also saves their IT team the physical challenge of installing a SAN solution into the very small space available in each location.
The single-point-of-failure was eliminated while satisfying design and operational goals and performance was better than traditional hardware solutions.
The solution enables the efficient, fully redundant, flexible and cost-effective environment the company requires.
Additionally, the customer has rethought how it delivers back-end storage for particular applications and use cases – for example, when it needs high performance (loads such as Oracle) spread across geographic locations or available storage in environments that it wants to isolate from its datacenter infrastructure. IT employees can deploy StorMagic’s SvSAN equipped with SSDs instead of more expensive “traditional” solutions or other synchronous replication solutions between two traditional storage systems. When the first of these SvSAN/SSD deployments went live it delivered a six-fold improvement in application efficiency – with no single point of failure in the environment and with the added benefit of consolidating four servers to two.
Simple
Provides a true ‘set and forget’ solution for any environment using centralized deployment and management – whether for thousands of sites or just one.
Cost-Effective
Eliminates physical SANs by converging compute and storage into a lightweight commodity server footprint thereby dramatically lowering costs.
Flexible
Delivers on today’s performance needs leveraging any CPU and storage type whilst avoiding over-provisioning with the confidence of scaling for tomorrow’s demands.
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