Retailers Need Edge Storage and an Active Archive

The retail industry faces severe challenges on many fronts. Online sales have taken a large slice of its market share, the price of many materials has skyrocketed, and supply chains have slowed. Retailers have turned to technology to increase efficiency and lower costs.

Modern retailers must deal with more sites, more devices, and more data. As so much of their business is now either computerized or online, they can’t afford downtime. Yet budgets are constrained, they typically have insufficient IT support onsite, have limited space for IT infrastructure, and are often under attack from cybercriminals.

At the same time, the industry is alive with innovation. Just think about the many technological advancements in recent years. COVID-19 acted as an accelerator for the rapid growth of technology in retail. Even in local mom-and-pop restaurants, you can access menus online, place orders, and have home deliveries made – yet you may never interact with a single human being directly.

Big box retailers, too, have done much to optimize how they sell, what they sell, and eke out every bit of revenue and profit. To pull this off, they have had to invest heavily in edge computing and edge storage.

The Cloud Didn’t Work for Retail
Retailers initially tried doing it all in the cloud. However, they found it to be too slow, not reliable enough, and often too expensive in many use cases. That’s why many retailers have turned away from the cloud to running applications onsite locally using edge computing. Now that they’re attempting to run everything locally, they have many devices and sites to deal with. Downtime is a huge issue. They can’t afford to be offline for five minutes, let alone hours or days.

The situation is made worse by the fact retailers generally don’t have access to IT staff locally. Therefore, any added technology must be simple to install, operate, and maintain.

There are other needs. Retailers need highly available edge computing and storage that takes up as little footprint and management as possible while remaining secure and always online. That necessitates a highly available infrastructure that can operate on one cluster. Yet that cluster must provide high performance to point-of-sale terminals, as well as for digital signage, video surveillance, analytics, internet of things devices and sensors, inventory systems, shipping management, online ordering, and many other applications.

Analytics, for example, is an area retailers can’t get enough of. They don’t want to wait to send data from their stores and outlets to a cloud for someone else to analyze at the head office. They need to run their own analytics locally and learn from it on the ground to provide answers and solutions that improve revenue in their stores today and tomorrow.

All of this, of course, drives the need for more and more storage of ever larger quantities of data. It is up to the storage industry, then, to provide the highly available solutions that retailers need so that data can be created, captured, and stored reliably. Further, it is up to us vendors to provide the means to retain data for very long periods within active archives to enable them to retain historical records, to analyze ever larger data sets, and to address compliance needs concerning data retention. With so many systems running at higher and higher resolutions and generating more and more data, active archiving becomes essential to keep costs down.

You can find out more about emerging use cases for active archives by listening to the recordings of the 2023 Active Archive Virtual Conference.