Remote sites and branch offices present unique challenges for IT managers. This is especially apparent in the retail, restaurant, and hospitality sectors. Outages due to hardware and network failures and requirements for off-hours software maintenance impact sales, staffing and support costs, and the company brand. At the same time, a limited per-location budget, a lack of on-site technical skills, and virtualization’s requirement for additional hardware and software, prevent organizations from accessing the high-availability benefits of virtualization. spcific issues include:
- Limited space: Stores, restaurants, remote sites and branch offices typically have limited space to accommodate additional servers, storage and networking equipment.
- Limited budget: IT budgets are often based upon an assumption that the applications will be hosted on a single low-cost PC server. However, this cheaper hardware option is a single point of failure that can interrupt the ability to service customers, record transactions, manage staffing and inventory, and process payments. In addition, maintenance must be done during high-cost, off hours.
- Lack of local IT: Few organizations can afford trained IT staff at all of their branch locations. It is equally inefficient to leverage centrally located IT staff to provide emergency onsite support. This approach increases travel costs and extends the problem-resolution time, which directly impacts profitability.
These unique challenges require an equally unique solution; a solution that not only provides the shared storage you need to achieve high availability, but also requires little additional space, enables remote monitoring and maintenance, and avoids high-cost emergency repairs.
This is where StorMagic’s SvSAN steps in. SvSAN is a storage virtual appliance that is not constrained by the typical limitations of external, shared storage and other Storage Virtual Appliances. How does it solve these unique challenges?:
- Limited Space: SvSAN can be installed on as few as two low-cost servers and leverages the internal storage of those servers as shared VMware datastores. Unlike other high-availability approaches, which require three servers to achieve high-availability, SvSAN requires no Quorum (Neutral Storage Host).
- Limited budget: Not only is SvSAN is one of the most affordable SVA’s available it can also provide HA on any edition of ESXi 4.1 or ESXi 5. SvSAN can even provide high availability on free versions of ESXi.
- Lack of local IT: SvSAN can be set up in as little as five minutes and can be managed from a central office or remotely. Where vCenter is preferred, SvSAN is integrated to provide further ease of use.
Action Item: Learn how SvSAN can solve these challenges for you!
Register Now at: http://info.stormagic.com/stormagic_webinar_nov211/
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