In Altoona, PA, Sheetz Chooses StorMagic SvSAN

Business challenge
Established in 1952 in Altoona, PA, Sheetz, Inc. is one of America’s fastest-growing family-owned and operated convenience store chains with more than 20,000 employees.

The company operates over 600 store locations throughout Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio and North Carolina. It provides a menu, and ordering is done through touch-screen order point terminals. All convenience stores are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It is recognized by Fortune as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For.

It previously used a collection of single function workstation class devices to provide various in-store technical services. They wanted to virtualize their environment with hyperconverged infrastructure that would minimize hardware sprawl, simplify support and administration, provide a platform for in-store technological innovation and improve resiliency within its convenience retail store environments.

Solution
After reviewing several market options including VMware vSAN and Zynstra, a NCR company, Sheetz decided to standardize on StorMagic SvSAN software to virtualize and add HA at all 600 of its convenience store locations. StorMagic was able to deploy and have Sheetz installed far ahead of schedule.

SvSAN along with the hypervisor were built into a simple-to-execute script that enabled the Sheetz IT department to deploy their first 100 post-pilot stores into production in less than 2 months.

Sheetz is open 24x7x365, so SvSAN’s HA was a selection criteria for Sheetz. StorMagic 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. Centralized application management, a reduction of hardware failures, HA and automated deployment have been benefits realized since making the switch to SvSAN.

Each location is configured with a 2-node cluster comprised of Dell servers, vSphere hypervisors and SvSAN Standard Edition. Thanks to SvSAN, Sheetz can focus on continuing to deliver customer service while StorMagic handles their data needs at each site with little to no intervention required.

Why StorMagic: 

• Simple to Install and Manage: Sheetz’s initial deployment in 100 stores went so smoothly that they are speeding up deployment across the remaining locations.
• HA: Sheetz convenience stores are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so its IT solution must also be always available to process and manage in-store technical services and solutions.
• Solution for Retail environments: SvSAN’s flexibility make it for retail stores, where no IT staff is present, to administer and address the management time and failures associated with infrastructure that presents single points of failure.

SvSAN Configuration