STORES Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 56)

NUTS AND BOLTS / COMMUNICATIONS Clearing the Clutter “De-duping” speeds traffic on grocer’s WAN BY FIONA SOLTES here’s no way around it: Expansion always comes with a price. And so, this year, as PCC Natural Markets opened its ninth customerowned grocery store in the Pacific Northwest, management faced a serious question: Where were all the new hires in the central office going to put their desks? Building out its office space would have been expensive, so PCC decided to optimize its wide area network (WAN) so that employees could work from remote sites without any restrictions on access. T “For other folks, the ROI is somewhat different,” says Jeff Aaron, vice president of marketing for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Silver Peak Systems, the company that provided PCC’s solution. “Sometimes you’re spending a lot on bandwidth and you want to maximize that bandwidth. Sometimes you’re trying to do back-up or replication off-site, and WAN optimization can help with that. But with these guys, it was all about real estate costs.” WAN optimization has been around for a decade, helping companies avoid having to buy bigger pipes for the transfer of data (going from a T1 line to a DS3 line can mean an increase of thousands of dollars per month). What is fairly new, however, is the process of deduplication. Basically, de-duplication software can look at all of the traffic moving across a WAN and ferret out the repetitive patterns. Then, rather than resending duplicate information, it is delivered locally. Take a 20-page PowerPoint presentation as an example: If just one slide has been changed, then that single slide would be the only one to move across the WAN. In PCC’s case, the goal is to “leverage current technology as much as possible,” says Mary Beutjer, the co-op’s systems administrator. PCC is in the midst of integrating all of its systems, from ordering and receiving to sales, and automating as much as possible. “There’s a lot of data that has to go back and forth between our stores and 56 STORES / JANUARY 2009 our office,” Beutjer says. “This just makes all of those file transfers more efficient.” That’s especially so with large batches, which previously were scheduled to run overnight. “For the most part, things weren’t screeching to a halt, but occasionally, “Our people often work with large spreadsheets, and the time it takes to open them has been reduced dramatically.” — Mary Beutjer, PCC Natural Markets if we had to push down a bunch of information during the day with price changes or this or that, it would really slow things down,” she says. “Our primary goal in accelerating the network was to enhance the experience for those working at the store’s offices. That’s where there’s more of the impact, where people are happy with the performance.” Future-proofing the WAN When companies optimize their solutions for each individual application, Aaron says, each new version of that application may require an upgrade of the WAN optimization device. The difference with Silver Peak’s NX appliance, he says, is that it focuses on “future-proofing the WAN.” Every few months, he says, “there’s a WWW.STORES.ORG http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - January 2009

STORES Magazine - Jauary 2008 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Mechanical Marvel P&G Invests in Ocado Now I Remember What Shoppers Think 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Breaking the Monotony Multi-Channel Concept2Watch E-Commerce Analytics Category Management IT Systems In-Store Technology IT Systems Communications Website Strategy Communications SOA Energy Video Surveillance Employee Theft Online Fraud Industry Perspective Loeb Retail Letter ARTS Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword End Cap

STORES Magazine - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.