Case Study: Largest Specialty Food Store Chain Retailing Company achieves continuous availability and per‑store cost savings with Stratus Technologies' Avance software

Retail chain finds continuous availability with Stratus Avance software

A U.S. specialty food retail chain with 23 stores across seven states faced repeated risks from server downtime: stores have no on-site IT, are hours from headquarters, and rely on store-level servers for ordering, receiving and nightly processing. The chain needed continuous availability and minimal data loss without the high per-store cost of a SAN, and wanted to reduce emergency on-site repairs while maintaining PCI-compliant network segmentation.

The company deployed Stratus Avance high‑availability software on paired Dell servers to provide automatic live migration and predictive fault handling without shared storage. Stress tests showed instant, blip-free failover and no data loss; the solution cut redundancy costs by roughly 66–75% versus a small SAN, let the nine-person IT team centrally manage alerts, preserved VLAN segmentation for PCI scope reduction, and is being rolled out to all new and upgraded stores.