Retail Data Storage Challenges & Open-E Solutions

Retail is like a watch. Most people use watches to simply check the time. They don’t immerse into all the mechanisms and little parts that need to be in motion to deliver the final effect. The same goes for buying and selling goods. Customers don’t realize all the processes between production, promotion, and distribution. Challenges standing behind retail concern not only employees who process orders and sell products directly but maybe even more importantly – data storage administrators. Those who provide space for collecting data and who keep that data consistent at all times. Today we will examine these challenges and check solutions that support not only your work as a data storage administrator, but also the quality of customer experience for your company’s clients!

Best Solutions for Storing Updated and Consistent Data

Every product status is constantly tracked, from the moment it’s available in the inventory to its purchase, and delivery. These items’ journey consists of certain stages and involves many systems like inventory management, point of sale, customer relationship management, or marketing automation. They generate lots of data which should be consistent and updated at all times to avoid disturbances, like the situation when a certain product appears to be available for purchase in the online shop but is not physically available at the warehouse or one of the physical stores.

Now realize the number of your company’s customers and multiply it with the number of products they buy. It results in an enormous amount of data to store and process if the company wants to provide good customer service.

A robust ERP system that monitors your inventory and transaction processes at all times is a must-have in this situation. It provides a stable flow of information that guarantees a high rate of customer satisfaction. Additionally, it enables you to centralize data from many sources in a single view  – providing your colleagues with a single source of truth. Of course, such a system needs a robust data storage environment to run on, but we will come back to this later.

Growing Retail Challenges Solved by a Scalable Data Storage

With the growing amounts of data coming from the aforementioned sources, you need lots of space to store it. You should also think about combining data storage with data protection by creating redundant copies of your data. Of course you have to keep in mind that they need some place to exist inside your infrastructure, and these requirenments will be growing over time. Scalability of your system can be obtained by using software-defined storage and combining many physical hardware components into a single logical entirety. By doing so, you can easily track the amount of space available and use Thin-provisioning to maximally distribute available space across different systems, resources, teams & people.

Okay, but what about scalability planning? Here comes the Over-provisioning, which is a great tool for planning data storage capacity expansion. It works as a sort of logical assumption that is later fulfilled with physical hardware components. This way, you can organize your work better and answer the needs of co-workers responsible for all stages of the retail processes.

How To Protect Data Generated In Retail Processes

Even the biggest data storage infrastructure is nothing without proper protection measures! As you know, disks happen to fail. This leads to losing all data these drives have been holding. You can overcome this threat by using one of the RAID-Z or mirroring redundancy setups. These techniques will distribute your data and its copies among other disks so that in case of a single drive failure, data can be rebuilt based on its saved copies. Additionally, you can send your data to other locations by using a stretched cluster. Such a solution protects against any physical threats like theft or damaging the hardware. Combining all these features provide your data storage with measures to protect your data both locally and by creating a backup in another location.

Snapshots are also worth mentioning, as they let you create light and read-only images of your data system in its current state, and can be rolled back whenever it’s necessary. They can be stored over a set period of time, both locally and on an off-site server for extra protection. It is a very space-efficient, powerful solution, especially in case of a ransomware attack, beacuse the malware can’t affect (encrypt) read-only files, including snapshots.

Now that we have mentioned all the most important options for enhancing a retail company’s data storage, we need a way to manage it. There are many solutions on the market, but there is only one software so remarkable, it was awarded during DCS 2023 awards in the “Data Centre ICT Storage Innovation of the Year” category, and the winner is…

Open-E JovianDSS: Software For Data Storage Management and Protection!

Our flagship product contains all the features you have already read about in this article, including:

• Thin- & Over-provisioning
• RAID-Z
• Mirroring redundancy setups
• Snapshots and their retention plans
• and more!

Apart from the technical aspects, it is also very business-friendly for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, Open-E JovianDSS is a hardware-agnostic software, meaning that you can combine it with the hardware of your choice and create a solution tailored to your needs.

Open-E works with a number of partners, including many well-known companies in the data storage market like Toshiba, ATTO, Intel, AIC and Western Digital! Together we test certain configurations and prepare certified solutions that have proven in work.

Another reason for using Open-E JovianDSS is the fact that our teams constantly work to provide you with new features and to upgrade the existing ones. You can expect that with our support, you won’t have to stress out if anything unexpected happens, and you can be sure that your software will get new updates that will enhance your data storage.

Finally, our software is available at a reasonable price. You can also benefit from choosing commodity hardware, which, thanks to virtualization, can perform really great thanks to proper utlization and configuration. Remember – everything should be chosen to match your purpose, but there is no need to overpay for something you don’t need. And that’s what we provide!

Real-life Retail Data Storage Cases

Proper data storage infrastructure is a key factor for retail success. You need to make sure that your data is always up to date, accurate, and secure. That’s why you need a smart and powerful system that can handle all your data challenges. Whether it’s inventory and transactions, customer relations and marketing, or anything else. To find out more about Open-E JovianDSS and how it can help your retail business, check out our case studies and get ready to take your data storage to the next level.