Future-Ready Store Infrastructure

Retailers realize that in order to stay competitive, they need to transform. They are facing thinning margins, increased competition from on-line commerce, and shifting customer loyalty. Sites need to become more efficient, minimize waste, and use automation to free up staff allowing them to focus on customer service.

Today’s customers are looking for more than just the traditional buying experience. They want to be catered to and engaged on a more personal level. They want access to more choices and more conveniences. They expect to be able to access those options in different ways, either at the store, at home or on the go. Businesses can use this data to track customer preferences and analyze buying trends to provide new services and a more personalized shopping experience which will lead to revenue growth.

By monitoring assets, businesses can react to system failures immediately, minimizing disruption to their business to prevent revenue loss. Automation and predictive maintenance solutions can drive efficiency in order to lower costs.

A Future-ready Store Infrastructure solution which combines Edge virtualization with IoT platforms can be the foundation of a retailer’s intelligent transformation.

Retail Intelligent Transformation Use Cases

IoT and transformative technologies enable brick-and-mortar retail operations to increase productivity and efficiency, enable automation, and offer new services. Initiatives such as interactive selling, real-time pricing, and in-store promotion help drive increased revenue and deeper customer engagement. And unified store operations and efficient supply chain initiatives can positively impact operational efficiency and your bottom line.

Deployment Best Practices

Lenovo and Scale Computing's HC3 Edge Retail Infrastructure Solution

A typical architecture includes remote locations of different sizes with varying compute needs. These Edge sites are connected to core business services and databases located in a data center or public cloud.

The Lenovo and Scale Computing Solution

In order to meet the variety of challenges retailers will face to update their Edge/remote infrastructure, Lenovo has partnered with Scale Computing to provide a solution that can meet their needs today and tomorrow. Scale Computing HC3 Edge software and Lenovo’s award-winning ThinkSystem servers and networking are ideal for retail sites because they encapsulate the simplicity, scalability, and availability that reduce infrastructure management footprint.

By providing a simple virtualized solution Edge locations can run both their traditional IT and OT applications along with their new transformative IoT applications on a common infrastructure solution. This reduces cost, simplifies management, and allows retailers to test and quickly deploy new services and applications. The solution can be deployed as either a standard three-node cluster, or for even smaller situations a single node. Systems can be remotely managed through a single web interface that allows an administrator visibility into hardware and software components including hypervisor and individual VM consoles.

Benefits of a Lenovo and Scale Computing Solution

Easy to deploy: Systems can be installed and cabled in minutes, virtual machines created in under an hour without specialized training.

Lower total cost of ownership: The HC3 Edge software includes the hypervisor, so there are no additional licensing costs associated with a separate hypervisor. Backup and recovery are also included.

Highly resilient: The architecture is built with layers of redundancy. Intelligent automation handles drive failures and node failures, redistributing data across remaining drives and VMs across remaining nodes. This ensures you stay up and running.

Simplified management: Administrators can quickly connect their web browsers to remote systems and manage storage and virtual machines from a single management interface, allowing updates to be handled remotely and ensure timely deployment.

Easy to expand and update: Adding another node to the solution is simple. Just install, cable, power up and assign an IP address and the node is seamlessly absorbed into the cluster. Software/firmware updates come directly to the web interface, where a single click allows them to be installed.

A single common hardware platform: Run all your applications from point of sale, building management, security applications, inventory management, asset management, etc., as well as your back office applications, and new IoT applications without the need for multiple systems, lowering costs and simplifying management.