For the retail and hospitality industries, managing applications and infrastructure at remote sites is a tough job. Typically, these sites have applications that are run at the location and a few key applications that need to be always running. For a restaurant, it may be point-of-sale and order scheduling. For a hotel, it may be reservations and door lock systems. If applications like these have an outage, the site is out of business leading to lost sales and poor customer satisfaction.

Companies have tried running key applications in the “cloud” or in corporate data centers, but if there is a problem at the data center or in the WAN connecting the remote sites to the application, then a lot of sites are affected, instead of a few. So, companies in these industries are increasingly looking at keeping applications running on-site.

But, there are a number of challenges that IT needs to address.

Hyper-converged Solution for Retail and HospitalityIncrease availability and reduce costs for remote sites

According to Standish Group

After 3 minutes, customers become frustrated if there is no progress in line. After 5 minutes, 33% of customers will leave the checkout line, and 50% will avoid returning to the retailer if they are forced to wait < 5 minutes1. “ ”

2

SOLUTION BRIEF

Challenge #1: Improve AvailabilityThe first is availability of the applications. To make applications highly available at a remote site, at least 2 servers are needed so if one server goes down, then the application can continue to run on the 2nd server. In order to have an application capable of running on either server, shared storage is needed so both servers can access the same application data. Typically, either a SAN or NAS would be considered. In most cases, the remote sites are so small that an inexpensive shared storage device is needed to fit the budget. But, lower-end storage devices have multiple single points of failure (single power supply, single fan, etc) so the shared storage becomes the more likely cause of an application outage.

Challenge #2: Minimize CostsMany companies in the retail and hospitality sector have 10s to 100s to 1,000s of remote sites. As much as availability is important, these companies have to meet a budget. So, IT is looking for the solution that costs the least to provide high availability to their applications at their remote sites. Any increase in costs for a single site is multiplied by 10 to 1,000. Therefore, costs need to be considered very carefully.

Challenge #3: Manage and Automate Remote SitesOften, remote sites have little IT expertise on site. The applications and infrastructure at these sites need to be extremely reliable and managed from a central location. This means a “cookie cutter” approach must be followed to ensure consistency across sites and an automated, turnkey deployment is needed.

Solution: DataCore(™) Virtual SANDataCore Virtual SAN eliminates the need for external shared storage by virtualizing internal and other direct-attached storage in the servers. Known as hyper-converged (or converged) storage, this model greatly simplifies the infrastructure and reduces costs at remote sites.

Minimize Server Footprint for High AvailabilityOne of DataCore Virtual SAN’s advantages is that it only needs 2 servers for high availability and failover. If a server fails for any reason, the data is available on the other server and the application can continue to run without any data loss. In comparison, other products require a minimum of 3 servers to provide high availability. This means DataCore Virtual SAN is ideal for locations that have space limitations or just need 2 servers to run their applications with high availability.

Lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)Another key factor for DataCore Virtual SAN is that it has the lowest TCO. To start, it requires the least amount of hardware to provide high availability. Next, other products require flash storage (either SSDs or PCIe cards) for I/O acceleration. With DataCore Virtual SAN, the RAM in the servers is used for I/O acceleration. This has two benefits. The first is that RAM is generally 10x faster than flash storage, so DataCore Virtual SAN provides better performance than other products. This means that virtual machine (VM) density can be increased, putting off the need for additional servers, minimizing infrastructure expenditures. The second benefit is that server flash is optional. While flash can be used as a storage tier, it is not required with DataCore Virtual SAN, further reducing costs.

With DataCore’s Virtual SAN solution customers report these impressive results2:

To learn more about our solution visit www.datacore.com/virtualsan

3

SOLUTION BRIEF

DataCore Virtual SAN supports all the major hypervisors and can run natively on Microsoft Windows which further reduces costs as it eliminates the need for extra Windows licenses. With 10s to 1,000s of remote site, these cost savings quickly add up.

Scalable, Centralized Storage ManagementDataCore Virtual SAN has an automated, turnkey deployment and provides centralized storage management for lots of remote sites. It is integrated with Microsoft System Center which means existing Microsoft management tools can be used to oversee and manage remote sites from a central location. DataCore Virtual SAN includes a comprehensive PowerShell scripting interface with over 250 documented cmdlets and software deployment wizards to automate and deploy with little manual intervention. In addition, DataCore Virtual SAN has extensive instrumentation making it simple to centrally monitor system storage behavior and performance at remote sites.

Possibly the most important aspect for managing many remote sites is the reliability of DataCore Virtual SAN. It is based on a 10th generation Software-defined Storage platform deployed at over 10,000 customer sites. It is a proven product, which eliminate storage as a failure point.

Case Study: National Restaurant ChainOne of DataCore’s customers is a large restaurant chain with over a thousand locations. They run a number of applications on site because they cannot have their restaurants grind to a halt due to a data center outage. These applications include point-of-sales, order scheduling and the like. With the applications running locally, the IT department needed to ensure that the on-site infrastructure was highly available. Many sites lacked space for computing equipment, so they also wanted to drive down the physical size and cost of the infrastructure. The IT department realized that converged storage was the right approach for them. Early on, they decided a software solution would be the best option as it didn’t lock them into any particular hardware vendor and allowed them to provide high-availability with only 2 servers. In addition, they needed a lower cost virtualization platform, so the solution needed to support Microsoft Hyper-V and automate management across the many locations.

They evaluated many alternatives and decided that DataCore Virtual SAN was the right solution. The DataCore product synchronously mirrors data between 2 servers for high availability (compared to 3 or 4 nodes required for other products), supports Microsoft Hyper-V and runs on standard x86 servers (giving a choice of server vendors). In addition, DataCore Virtual SAN accelerates I/O using adaptive RAM caching directly on the servers, which means Flash storage is not needed, further reducing costs. Lastly, the plethora of management capabilities meant they could easily automate deployment and centrally manage all their restaurant locations.

By dramatically reducing costs and space needed for a highly available infrastructure while providing centralized management from a few to thousands of sites, DataCore Virtual SAN is the ideal solution for remote sites in the retail and hospitality industries.

For additional information, please visit www.datacore.com or email info@datacore.com© 2014 DataCore Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. DataCore, the DataCore logo and SANsymphony are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataCore Software Corporation. All other products, services and company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

1014

Works Cited

1. The Standish Group (www.thestandishgroup.com)

2. Research results by TechValidate (www.techvalidate.com)

DataCore SoftwareDataCore is a leader in software-defined storage. The company’s storage virtualization software empowers organizations to seamlessly manage and scale their data storage architectures, delivering massive performance gains at a fraction of the cost of solutions offered by legacy storage hardware vendors. Backed by 10,000 customer sites around the world, DataCore’s adaptive and self-learning and healing technology takes the pain out of manual processes and helps deliver on the promise of the new software-defined data center through its hardware agnostic architecture. For more information go to www.datacore.com