Giant Eagle Inc., a U.S. food, fuel and pharmacy retailer, has selected StorMagic SvSAN virtual SAN software and SvKMS encryption key management to ensure uptime and safeguard data in its 200-plus supermarkets with in-store pharmacies.
After experiencing challenges with its aging physical SAN solution, rising maintenance costs and sourcing issues with the solution’s self-encrypting disk drives, the Giant Eagle team began to review alternate options. StorMagic’s virtual SAN and encryption key management systems were chosen to ensure uptime and add enterprise-grade key management capabilities into the environment. Today, SvSAN is running on three-node Lenovo clusters at each store and SvKMS on three virtual machines at its primary datacenter.
“Giant Eagle selected StorMagic’s three-node configuration for increased resiliency and availability to deliver a superior end user experience while providing a highly secure platform,” said Jeff Moore, senior manager, enterprise server at Giant Eagle Inc. “StorMagic SvSAN was implemented to virtualize our storage, thus eliminating challenges related to spinning disk at edge sites, and SvKMS was a natural addition for advanced key management. The SvKMS key management solution has provided additional integration within the StorMagic platform and provides the encryption we require to keep our customers’ critical data secure.”
StorMagic SvSAN is compatible with any x86 server, requires a minimal IT footprint and is designed to be easily managed by any IT professional, establishing it as an ideal solution for retail environments. SvKMS is a flexible, enterprise-grade key manager that affordably addresses a plethora of security challenges.
“StorMagic kept hardware requirements and costs low while helping Giant Eagle meet its primary goals of adding high availability and encryption to protect sensitive [customer] data while meeting all major compliance regulations,” said Brian Grainger, StorMagic’s CRO. “The retailer is now achieving a high level of redundancy with only three nodes per store, which would have required four or five servers with competing solutions. By also implementing our enterprise key manager, Giant Eagle has resolved two major issues that edge sites commonly face today – ensuring both uptime and security – that will easily expand into their core datacenter workloads over time.”
Giant Eagle Inc., ranked among the top 40 on Forbes magazine’s largest private corporations list, is one of the nation’s largest food retailers and distributors with approximately $9.7 billion in annual sales. Founded in 1931, it has more than 470 stores throughout western Pennsylvania, north central Ohio, northern West Virginia, Maryland and Indiana. Visit gianteagle.com for more information.
