The data dilemma in today's retail edge IT environment

Retailers are inundated with many evolving technologies that they have either invested in or are considering purchasing, including point of sale (POS), artificial intelligence and analytics, automation, augmented and virtual reality, IoT, video surveillance, and more, Making store operations more complex.

Today, retailers are grappling with growing data management challenges. They need to keep critical enterprise IT systems online 24/7 to ensure continuous business operations and customer application uptime, while separately managing equally important data sets and in-store video surveillance footage.

All this data is created and managed across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individual sites is called "edge computing." Let’s explore today’s edge computing woes and identify ways retail IT managers can purchase the ideal solution for multi-store environments.

Retailer Data Dilemma

Retailers are inundated with many evolving technologies that they have either invested in or are considering purchasing, including point of sale (POS), artificial intelligence and analytics, automation , augmented and virtual reality, Internet of Things, video surveillance, etc., making store operations more complex. Given the rise of BOPIS and similar products, many businesses must integrate their e-commerce and in-store operations.

Large chain stores with hundreds or thousands of locations may quickly encounter cost control and complexity issues associated with managing data at each location. Sites such as SMBs and small franchises, smaller retailers still need to protect the data generated in their stores, but they tend to have smaller budgets and smaller IT staff than larger retailers.

With the rapid development of technology solutions, today's retailers are launching many new products to help reduce costs and maximize the use of resources. Today, retail IT managers can eliminate outdated systems to optimize multiple environments. A direct-attached storage (DAS) system using server disk drives or external join boxes (JBOD) can be a simple solution for retailers, who can provide some normality by leveraging the internal RAID cards of each store's servers. operation hours.

But DAS has its limitations and additional costs, as there is a single point of failure in store deployments, and infrastructure outages, such as the loss of a server or multiple hard drives, may prevent access to data or applications to maintain run.

Today’s HCI, along with virtualized servers and storage systems, offers tremendous on-site capabilities in every store, especially as uptime and data protection remain risk factors. High-availability computing and storage clusters in the store itself can solve these problems.

Uptime Flexibility and High Availability for Retailers

As we’ve seen in countless headlines, downtime is one of the biggest fears in the IT world. When a store "goes out of business," not only is business revenue affected, but customer loyalty and brand reputation are also at risk. This makes high availability and ensuring there are no single points of failure a key priority for retailers everywhere as they are tasked with maintaining around-the-clock in-store uptime.

General attributes that will further expand retailer storage costs include ease of use, robustness and flexibility. Storage should be easy to deploy and manage from one or multiple locations. The solution should be hardware, hypervisor and software agnostic so as to plug into any existing or new environment and be compatible with products from all major vendors. This flexibility will allow retail IT managers to customize existing, preferred or future hardware and software products, future-proofing the environment and protecting the initial investment.

Build a scalable, affordable video surveillance recording storage environment

In addition to in-store data generated by POS systems and other applications, many retailers also capture video surveillance footage. This video capture exists for one of two reasons: first, for in-store security, and second, for business insights.

While video data can be extremely valuable, these files are large and may require bulky and expensive storage solutions. Retailers must also ensure they meet the latest legal, regulatory legality and retention requirements for video and other customer data. It's best to completely separate your video surveillance IT infrastructure from your enterprise data storage environment.

To protect budgets, video surveillance storage capabilities should be optimized to meet the ongoing expectations of more cameras generating more and more data in more places, at higher resolutions, and at frame rates. A defined strategy for storing, retaining, and accessing video is required, including defined policies and automation to make video management truly manageable.

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