StorMagic®, simplifying storage at the edge, announced that Sheetz, one of America’s fastest growing family-owned and operated convenience retailers for more than 67 years, is standardizing on StorMagic SvSAN software to virtualize and add high availability at hundreds of its convenience store locations. The new hyperconverged edge solution has enabled Sheetz to quickly and affordably minimize hardware sprawl, simplify support and administration, provide a platform for in-store technological innovation and improve resiliency within its environment.
Sheetz previously used a collection of single-function workstation class devices to provide various in-store technical services. SvSAN was chosen to simplify the underlying infrastructure and management of many business-level applications including in-store system orchestration, credit processing, the MySheetz Card® loyalty program and Sheetz’s proprietary kitchen management application suite. Each store contains a two-node cluster comprised of Dell servers, VMware vSphere hypervisors and SvSAN Standard Edition.
“Sheetz has been able to centrally manage multiple in-store applications quickly and affordably and drastically reduce the number of hardware failures with StorMagic,” said Scott Robertson, universal endpoint unit manager, Sheetz. “Our initial POC and extended pilot of ten locations was spread out over the course of ten months. This was done so that we could get comfortable with the solution as well as the process to convert the stores in a manner that was minimally impactful to operations. Once we decided to deploy company wide, we were able to deploy to over one hundred stores within a two-month period. Thanks to some automated processes and the relatively seamless conversions, we’ve escalated the timeline to standardize on SvSAN across all of our convenience stores. The StorMagic support team was top-notch and helped us plan out the deployment procedures and deal with any minor issues that popped up. They have been fantastic partners throughout this entire journey.”
SvSAN is ideal for retailers like Sheetz who want to process and manage data locally at hundreds or thousands of smaller sites. Its ease of use, affordability and flexibility make it a key component for store locations where no IT staff is present to administer, and address failures associated with infrastructure that presents single points of failure and lacks high availability.
“Sheetz is a privately-held family operated business that serves customers across six states 24 hours every day, year round,” said Brian Grainger, StorMagic’s CRO. “SvSAN supports their daily business goals by offering ease of use and uptime. They can focus on delivering excellent customer service while StorMagic handles data needs at each site with little to no intervention required.”
