Solutions for Retail & E-Commerce
Why Virtual Instruments in Retail & E-Commerce?
If time is money, then retailers can literally count the cost of downtime. When their supply chain, e-commerce site or back-office information technology and communications systems fail their competitors are only a few storefronts or website clicks away.
Optimizing Infrastructure performance: A recipe for success
Whether it’s the payments processing, or merchandising and analytics systems at the head office, response times at the application, fabric and storage layers of a retailer’s IT infrastructure can dramatically impact its ability to sell goods, manage suppliers and customers and, essentially, do business.
Simply throwing more people, bandwidth or storage at perceived issues may only mask an unrelated, underlying problem, at a time when capital expenditure (capex) is constrained by global economic instability.
VirtualWisdom provides the comprehensive Storage Area Network (SAN) and virtual infrastructure instrumentation and monitoring retailers require to proactively identify and troubleshoot I/O problems before they become business issues.
Retail and e-commerce organizations can now realize the full economic benefits of IT infrastructure visibility from the virtual machine to the storage system. Drawing on Virtual Instruments’ deep expertise in Fibre Channel SAN monitoring, VirtualWisdom is designed to:
- Non-intrusively monitor the performance of virtualized applications in real-time by analyzing SAN traffic data at the I/O level – the only SAN monitoring solution to do so;
- Eliminate application, SAN or storage latency and bottlenecks affecting operational IT system performance;
- Identify pervasive IT infrastructure over-provisioning, ‘right-size’ IT resources according to demand and ‘de-risk’ new IT investments;
- Enable more accurate and detailed tracking of service level agreements (SLAs);
- Simplify the migration to and management of private cloud computing environments for even more predictable and agile IT performance.
These capabilities can have a profound impact on your ability to provide superior support for mission-critical applications that can improve customer service levels, operating margins and, ultimately, a retailer’s bottom line.
Delivering beyond IT value
Beyond improving IT systems performance boosting the service levels that assure the day-to-day operational running of a retailer’s business and driving down IT costs, comprehensive infrastructure monitoring and optimization also facilitates broader business benefits.
VirtualWisdom helps address regulatory compliance and increase revenue generation. Its rich functionality provides the management oversight and control needed on which to build strong foundations of service reliability, brand trust and customer loyalty. It enables an organization to:
- Proactively monitor the IT systems health and identify the root causes of potential issues before becoming problems that can affect ‘business as usual’;
- Deliver granular infrastructure performance data required by IT teams alongside summary management information via intuitive, visually driven dashboards;
- Support data audit, governance and forensic requirements to validate compliance with business or industry regulations, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS);
- Reduce server and SAN hardware investments by up to 50% and eliminate unnecessary spending on software licences, data centre power, cooling and floor space;
- Divert capex savings to revenue generating initiatives, support more predictable operational IT spending and provide greater visibility into IT supplier performance.
The ability to monitor, report, trend and diagnose infrastructure performance issues in a reliable and scalable way is essential for retail IT infrastructures, just as retailers now in turn rely on these infrastructures to support their staff and customers.
Find underutilized IT resources, dynamically rebalance workloads and minimize new server, storage or switch port investment. Reduce helpdesk calls and trouble tickets by up to 80%. And free up more of the IT department’s time to support business development and innovation.
To learn how Virtual Instruments can help you, contact us today.
Case Study
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Grocery Retailer Supervalu Presentation | By investing in the Virtual Instruments, Supervalu was able to garner Tier 1 performance by utilizing Tier 2 storage. Scott Furhman, Senior Systems Engineer at Supervalu, presents "SAN Performance Management in Large and Complex Data Centers". In this SNW presentation, Scott shares best practices learned from the Supervalu deployment of the Virtual Instruments solution and provides the business benefits to Supervalu of managing SAN performance.
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Leading Global Ecommerce Business Case Study | The company, with revenues growing 33% year over year, is one of the leading e-commerce businesses allowing payments and money transfers to be made securely through the internet. The challenge facing the IT administrators is really one of transaction visibility through the I/O system, getting meaningful data about their infrastructure on a continuous, real-time basis. Without this data and measurement system, application performance is difficult to optimize, and every application demands the most expensive, tier 1 storage.
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North America Based Grocery and Supply Chain | This North America-based grocery and supply chain was experiencing escalating costs of IT in this hyper-competitive market. IT was under pressure to help contribute to the historical profitability of the company by doing more with existing resources. But while the SAN was growing at over 20% per year, the staff was spending an inordinate amount of IT staff time spent on trying to diagnose SAN problems.
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Large Retailer | This leading Retailer was experiencing periodic application performance issues that were affecting both the retail stores and online operations. It was not clear if the performance was originating from the application servers, SAN fabric, storage, or a combination thereof, but it was a chronic problem that was burning up IT staff time and cross IT group goodwill.
Analyst Reports
- Taneja Group White Paper - Virtual Instruments Customer Benefits Field Study | March 2010 | Taneja Group conducted in-depth telephone interviews with a set of Virtual Instruments (VI) customers, of varying sizes and across several industry verticals, over a five-month period in late 2009 and early 2010.
Whitepapers
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Twelve Ways that Virtual Instruments Enhances your Existing Virtual Infrastructure and SAN Management Tools | January 2010 | The only hope of solving today's virtualized data center challenges is with better management tools. Today's most common solutions such as Enterprise Management Frameworks, Storage Resource Management, and specialized element managers all lack physical, real-time monitoring of the IO path. Virtual Infrastructure Optimization solutions, such as VirtualWisdom, are the only products that can non-intrusively optimize the performance of applications, including virtualized applications, in continuous real-time by measuring actual SAN I/O traffic data.
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Datacenter Consolidation Best Practices Whitepaper | December 2010 | The benefits of storage consolidation are being realized by more and more companies and seen as a way to streamline many storage-driven applications. Virtual Instruments develops optimization solutions for managing the growth and design of storage and storage area network (SAN) -related technologies.
Product Datasheets
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VirtualWisdom Overview | VirtualWisdom provides comprehensive instrumentation and I/O measurement capabilities that reduce application response time, increase availability, and improve resource utilization. VirtualWisdom is the only product that can non-intrusively improve the performance of applications and increase the benefits of cloud-driven virtualization in real time by analyzing actual I/O traffic data.
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Retail and E-Commerce Solution Brief | Any retail or e-commerce company knows that’s whether it is the payments processing system in-store and online, or the merchandising and analytics systems at head office, response times at the application, fabric and storage layers of a retailer’s IT infrastructure can have a big impact. VirtualWisdom’s ability to provide a comprehensive, accurate and ongoing measurement of infrastructure resources and performance can give retailers a competitive edge.
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