Overview
Royal Farms, a convenience store and fuel chain with about 300 locations, wanted to optimize operations, enhance customer experiences, and achieve unparalleled scalability and adaptability in a rapidly evolving industry. Its vision is “to be the quick and friendly restaurant of choice by offering quality, freshly prepared foods, convenience products, and value priced fuel.” It faced significant challenges in modernizing its IT infrastructure, and this case study explores the problems it aimed to solve, why the team chose Scale Computing Platform (SC//Platform), and the technologies that played a crucial role in addressing its needs.
Problem
Royal Farms sought to enhance its IT infrastructure for its locations, which are open 24 hours, 365 days a year. To keep those stores open and productive at all times it required a solution capable of supporting a high storage capacity within limited physical space constraints (maximum 19" depth). Its existing infrastructure was outdated and fragmented, leading to inefficiencies and increased operational costs. The primary objectives were:
- Edge Computing: Deploying a platform that provides cloud-like simplicity at the edge, virtualizing legacy physical workloads like Fuel Controllers, consolidating virtual machines like NCR Point of Sale (POS), Electronic Payment Controllers, and fueling innovation by accommodating future virtual desktops (VDI), loss prevention, containerization and other future use cases such as AI and computer vision. Edge computing would allow Royal Farms to run applications and process data outside centralized data centers and in stores where data is created and utilized.
- High Availability: Royal Farms wanted to run its applications on a fully integrated platform that supports the 365/24/7 availability needs of its customers.
- Cost Efficiency and Improved Total Cost of Ownership: Achieve these goals within a constrained budget, ensuring a cost-effective deployment and ongoing management across all locations as well as little need for additional IT staff or training.
- Unified Management: Maintain a unified management interface to avoid the complexities of managing separate systems for storage and servers.
- Space Constraints: Fit the solution within the limited physical space available in its existing and new store racks.
Evaluation of Alternatives
Royal Farms considered multiple solutions, including a homegrown Hyper-V based deployment and dedicated edge computing-focused infrastructure offerings. The evaluation included:
- Acumera: while this organization has a strong focus on retail and convenience stores, their technology could not deliver the scalability and high availability needed for stores that are always open, dependent on having their applications always available.
- Dell hardware and Hyper-V: Initially tested for their small central data center, Dell/Hyper-V installations had gone well, boosting confidence in its ability to build a similar edge platform.
- StorMagic: Evaluated for its software defined storage solution designed for edge deployments.
- Scale Computing Platform (SC//Platform): Evaluated for its integrated approach, speed of deployment, ease of management, small form factor, and potential to meet its virtualization and storage needs within the physical and budgetary constraints.
Why Royal Farms Chose Scale Computing
After thorough evaluation and proof of concept (POC) testing, Royal Farms chose Scale Computing for several compelling reasons:
- Ease of Deployment: A solution that can be deployed quickly and easily with zero touch provisioning, across all of their locations within four months to accelerate the opening of new stores.
- Form Factor and Integration: Scale Computing offered a micro form factor from its HE100 line, which fit the limited space in the store racks while providing the required compute and storage capabilities.
- Unified Management: SC//Platform provided a single, unified management interface, simplifying the administration of its virtualized environment.
- Scalability and Flexibility: SC//Platform demonstrated the flexibility to scale storage and compute resources according to Royal Farms' needs, including potential solutions to achieve the desired 60TB of usable, resilient storage.
- Cost Efficiency: The financial discussions highlighted that SC//Platform could deliver a solution within the budget constraints, particularly through the use of bring-your-own-hardware options. Overall Total Cost of Ownership calculations were also a strong consideration.
Our store is an essential resource for the community, providing dairy, services, fuel, and hot and cold foods around the clock. From our World Famous fried chicken to the World’s freshest cup of coffee, our customers need us any time of day. Scale Computing HyperCore helps us provide that service the only way we know how: Real Fresh, Real Fast!— Jesse Wolcott, IT Infrastructure Manager, Royal Farms
Key Technologies and Solutions
Several key technologies and configurations were crucial in addressing Royal Farms' requirements:
- SC//Fleet Manager: Whether in a data center or at the edge, from 1-50,000 clusters, IT infrastructure managers can see and manage clusters from a single cloud-hosted application. Scale Computing Fleet Manager is the first cloud-hosted monitoring and management tool built for hyperconverged edge computing infrastructure at scale.
- Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP): A feature of SC//Fleet Manager, ZTP provides cloud-like simplicity for administrators, allowing organizations to centrally initialize clusters in SC//Fleet Manager prior to nodes arriving on-premises, decreasing the time of installation by 90% or more. For IT Managers with multiple clusters, ZTP virtually eliminates the need for IT staff to be present at edge installations, significantly reduces the costs and lead time for adding or replacing hardware at the edge, and allows organizations to deploy at scale.
- SC//HyperCore: Scale Computing HyperCore software saves time and valuable resources with software, servers, and storage in a fully integrated platform. The award-winning self-healing platform identifies, reduces, and corrects problems in real-time, ensuring uninterrupted operations and optimal performance, introducing high availability even in the most demanding and remote environments.
- AIME: Autonomous Infrastructure Management Engine (AIME) is the orchestration and management AIOps engine that powers SC//HyperCore. AIME drastically reduces the amount of effort required to deploy, secure, manage, and maintain on-premises infrastructure. The AIOps technology handles day-to-day administrative tasks and maintenance automatically, monitors the system for security, hardware, and software errors, and remediates those errors where possible. It also maintains current firmware, driver, and OS versions for security and stability purposes.
- Ansible: Royal Farms uses the Scale Computing Hypercore Collection for Ansible to automate and standardize the configuration of their HyperCore fleet as well as to automate the deployment of virtual machine templates and application deployment. The end result is rapid and consistent configuration and deployment enabling them to meet the tight timeline requirement of the business.
- HE100 Systems: These small form factor nodes were central to fitting the solution within the 19" depth limitation while providing necessary compute and storage.
Implementation and Results
The initial Proof of Concept (POC) with Scale Computing included installing systems at Royal Farms locations and testing with live applications. Those applications include the NCR Radiant Epsilon Credit Controller Package.
Royal Farms started out with 11-12 store deployments per week and is ramping up to 20-25 within the coming weeks. The ability to pre-stage clusters through ZTP has contributed greatly to that speed of deployment for their team of 20 IT professionals.
Total Cost of Ownership Benefits Expected
- Reduced Downtime: Traditionally, recovery from a hardware failure running a critical workload takes 1-8 hours. With Scale Computing Platform, Royal Farms is expecting that recovery from a hardware failure running a critical workload takes less than 10 minutes, approximately a 90% reduction in recovery time.
- System Management: because of the simplicity of management in SC//Fleet Manager, Based on POC and pilot results, Royal Farms expects that their time spent managing the overall infrastructure will be reduced by 75% compared to other vendors.
- Software Licensing: Since Scale Computing Platform software is integrated, with all features and updates available, there is no time and money spent on multiple vendors. This saves both the time of dealing with multiple parties during install and support, as well as up to 75% less in licensing costs.
Conclusion
Scale Computing provided a comprehensive solution that met Royal Farms' needs for virtualizing surveillance systems within strict space and budget constraints. The speed of deployment, ease of management, and small form factor of SC// Platform were pivotal in its decision. As Royal Farms moves forward with the implementation, the ongoing collaboration and technical support from Scale Computing will be essential to ensuring a smooth transition and successful deployment across all their locations.