In 2011 InformationWeek.com reported that over $26.5 billion in revenue is lost each year from downtime. It is then understandable that revenue loss is the primary concern of retailers when considering the direct impact of store downtime. However, retail organizations have more to lose from downtime than revenue alone. Customer loyalty, brand equity and employee productivity/motivation are also affected.
So what are these organizations doing to prevent downtime?
Retail organizations, as seen in this recent customer profile, are turning to Storage Virtual Appliances (SVA) to enable High Availability (HA) in their virtualized store environments. Implementing SVAs into existing/new 2+ server virtualized store environments ensures continuous application and data availability.
Storage Virtual Appliances
- Provide shared storage more cost effectively
- Require no dedicated storage hardware
- Require no specialized training
- Transform internal disk drives into a virtual SAN
- Enable a highly-available ESX/i environment without external, shared storage
- Provide shared storage cost effectively
- Don’t need dedicated hardware
- Turn internal disk drives into a virtual SAN
- Enable a highly available ESX/i environment without external shared storage
- Prevent data loss from drive failures by mirroring datastores between ESX/i servers
- Leverage the processing power of ESX/i servers
- Provide data-sharing for advanced ESX/i features such as VMotion, DRS and VCB.
- Scale performance and capacity as needs grow
StorMagics recently announced that its SVA solution SvSAN was standardized in over 2000 retail stores of a major US based retail giant. SvSAN version 5 was developed specifically to meet the growing demands of enterprise retail organizations managing multiple distributed stores and as a result has seen growing success in this sector.
