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. DataCore 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.

1. 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 theWAN 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 Hospitality
Increase 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. 2
SOLUTION BRIEF
Challenge #1: Improve Availability
The 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 Costs
Many 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 Sites
Often, 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 SAN
DataCoreVirtual 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 Availability
One of DataCoreVirtual 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 DataCoreVirtual SAN
is ideal for locations that have space limitations or just need
2 servers to run their applications with high availability.
LowestTotal Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Another key factor for DataCoreVirtual SAN is that it has the
lowestTCO. 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
DataCoreVirtual 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 DataCoreVirtual 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 DataCoreVirtual SAN, further reducing costs.
With DataCore’sVirtual SAN solution customers report these impressive results2
:
To learn more about our solution visit www.datacore.com/virtualsan

3. 3
SOLUTION BRIEF
DataCoreVirtual SAN supports all the major hypervisors
and can run natively on MicrosoftWindows which
further reduces costs as it eliminates the need
for extraWindows licenses. With 10s to 1,000s of
remote site, these cost savings quickly add up.
Scalable, Centralized Storage Management
DataCoreVirtual 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,
DataCoreVirtual 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 DataCoreVirtual 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 Chain
One 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 DataCoreVirtual 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,
DataCoreVirtual 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, DataCoreVirtual SAN is the ideal solution for
remote sites in the retail and hospitality industries.

4. For additional information, please visit www.datacore.com or email info@datacore.com
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1014
Works Cited
1.The Standish Group (www.thestandishgroup.com)
2. Research results byTechValidate (www.techvalidate.com)
DataCore Software
DataCore 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