Anton Jacobsz, MD of Riverbed distributor Networks Unlimited, says new approaches to IT can help cut the costs of IT in retail.
In a competitive market where margins are constantly being eroded, retailers have to be exceptionally price-sensitive on their IT investments, notes Jacobsz. However, at the same time, they must embrace more efficient new solutions in order to improve their operations.
In many cases, retailers with geographically dispersed branches have been hesitant to move to consolidated, virtualised solutions due to concerns about latency, security and the high cost of bandwidth.
Jacobsz says many take a “barely enough to get by” approach, using on-premise servers and IT support staff, uploading their data to the central servers by night, and running up high costs in system maintenance and support.
The typical data centre serves 55 branches, and only 8% of these branches have fully consolidated IT infrastructure. As a result, according to IDC, more than $4-billion is being spent on remote office infrastructure and maintenance every year. All of the islands of distributed branch infrastructure have been necessary to meet local performance and reliability needs to ensure the productivity of employees working in branch offices.
This model not only adds to costs, it also complicates management and puts enterprises at risk of lost or exposed data in the case of crime or disaster, as well as delaying the updating of sales and stock data in the central servers.
Jacobsz says: “Retailers need cost-effective access to central data warehouses; better performance and availability for business-critical applications; improved customer service with faster order management and customer-records systems; streamlined IT infrastructure; and simplified operational management.”
The solution, he says, lies in appliances that allow for the provision of virtual servers at branch level, so that branch PCs and POS devices are connected directly to the appliance and data is continually transferred to the central server via an optimised WAN.
This, he notes, enables real-time tracking of sales and stock levels for proactive action by management; as well as simplifying operations and reducing the cost of on-site maintenance. It also safeguards branch and customer data and allows for virtually instant recovery in the case of disaster. “This is particularly important for enterprises with branches in high risk areas,” says Jacobsz.
The SteelFusion 3.1 product from Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure, is the first branch converged infrastructure that centralises data in the data centre and delivers local performance and nearly instant recovery at the branch.
SteelFusion fuses branch servers, storage, networking, and virtualisation infrastructure into a single solution that, as measured by Taneja Group, reduces the average time to provision branch services by 30 times (from five hours to 10 minutes) and recovery from branch outages by 96 times (from 24 hours to 15 minutes). With SteelFusion 3.0, Riverbed raises the bar with even faster branch recovery, higher data capacity, and faster performance.