What does your perfect in-store infrastructure look like?
Retail was always digitizing fast — and now post COVID, that process has only sped up as retail stores reinvent themselves. Retailers need to be able to deliver a variety of in-store applications — from the traditional POS, to traffic analytics to experiential services like smart mirrors and smart signage driven by hyper-personalization. New autonomous store capabilities — bypassing the checkout altogether — will change the way people convenience shop.
Smart retail needs smarter infrastructure. Here are 5 things the perfect in-store infrastructure needs to be able to do:
Support a mix of applications — some legacy, some bleeding edge
Enable continuous operations — with high availability, data protection and disconnected running
Be centrally manageable — so problems can be fixed quickly without requiring a truck roll
Fit anywhere — locations have limited space, power and cooling — so the solution needs to be small, rugged and work in a broom closet if need be
Be deploy-and-forget — be easy to on-board new devices and not require special skillsets on-site to keep things moving
Traditional cloud infrastructure — be it AWS or your own datacenter — has an important place in all this. You need the ability to run a single, consistent platform from the retail store (at the edge) to the cloud to reduce management pain, keep skillset requirements low, and make application development simpler.
Sunlight provides a complete software-defined edge infrastructure platform that makes deploying and managing edge applications (in store) easy. It enables you to run all your VM-based and cloud-native applications on a common hyperconverged (HCI) platform with high-availability and isolation.
At less than one-fifth the cost of traditional data center HCI solutions, we make the infrastructure fit the economics of the Edge.
Get the ‘Simplifying Connected Retail’ whitepaper here: https://sunlight.io/resources/whitepapers-and-datasheets/simplifying-connected-retail
