End-to-End Retail IT Infrastructure Management: What's new SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 | SUSE Communities

End-to-End Retail IT Infrastructure Management: What’s new SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1

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Manage, Secure, Automate and Comply with the newest version of the SUSE Infrastructure Management Solution for the Retail industry.

From Mainframe and HPC Clusters to bare metal servers and VMs down to point of service terminals, kiosks, self-service and reverse-vending system Linux deployments, SUSE Manager for Retail is designed to help you reduce costs, optimize operations, and ensure compliance across your retail IT infrastructure while reducing complexity and regaining control.

Built on SUSE Manager 4.1, we are very pleased to announce we will be very shortly releasing SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1, our best-in-class open source infrastructure management, optimized and tailored specifically for the retail industry.

This latest release of SUSE Manager for Retail delivers new enhancements focused on improving operational efficiency, increasing scalability, reducing complexity and simplifying management.

As a key component of a retail software-defined infrastructure, SUSE Manager for 4.1 delivers the following new or enhanced capabilities to your retail environment:

Improved operational efficiency with new capabilities focused on supporting small store operations, enhanced offline capabilities and image management over Wi-Fi.

• Most large retailers have diverse store footprints. These may be large stores with hundreds of Point of Service (POS) devices but also smaller branches with only a few. Prior versions of SUSE Manager for Retail required a branch server to be present in each store which increased the cost and complexity of setup for certain environments. With SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 we introduce the support for small branch operations where the branch server can run remotely in the datacentre or in the cloud. With this you can manage multiple small stores without having to deploy a branch server in each of those stores. From small to very large setups, this reduces complexity of the store infrastructure and lowers cost by reducing unnecessary hardware.

• When you open new stores, POS devices may be deployed before any network is available at the location. In order to get the new store operational quickly, the POS terminals need to be brought up without the initial network boot cycle. SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 provides the ability to create an image for the USB as well as for an OEM preload, allowing you to boot the terminal from the USB without having network connectivity upfront at the store.

• Also many stores today only use wireless networking. Adding wired networking in those stores for managing their POS devices would lead to increased costs and complexity. So, being able to manage the deployment and maintenance of POS terminals over the store’s Wi-Fi removes the costs associated with physical networking. Now you have the support for USB boot images, registers can easily be set up and locally booted using Wi-Fi and a USB stick. This provides greater business agility by allowing wireless “holiday registers” to be quickly deployed to meet seasonal demands in store.

Enhanced virtual machine management and monitoring capabilities, enabling fully-integrated store management.

• A major challenge you may face as a retailer is that store locations are typically geographically distributed with no dedicated IT staff available. In this case server virtualization plays a key role in modernizing a distributed store infrastructure and helps improve operations. With virtualization retail environments can benefit from agility, availability and standardization.

In order to stay ahead of the competition and provide the best shopping experience to their customers, retailers need to be able to deploy new applications to the stores quickly and efficiently. The enhanced virtual machine management features of SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 deliver performance, management and availability improvements to the store operations.

• SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 expands the new Prometheus/ Grafana-based monitoring stack introduced with version SUSE Manager 4 with enhanced support for large federated and non-routable network environments, ideal for monitoring highly distributed retail environments.Retailers are not only able to monitor their branch servers in the stores but also their store POS devices. This allows the branches to collect metrics from the stores and send to a central aggregator that provides retailers with a centralized view of the health of their stores.

Scale Retail environments without compromise with performance and scalability enhancements.

• With the increasing prevalence of kiosks, self-checkout devices, IoT devices and digital signage in the stores, your retail environment has probably become very large. With our performance and scalability enhancements, SUSE Manager for Retail can now scale to tens of thousands of end point devices and beyond. This allows you the flexibility to grow your infrastructure as required by your business needs, with the assurance that SUSE Manager for Retail will be able to manage large retail estates.

With the “SUSE Manager Hub – Tech Preview” multiserver architecture we’re gradually introducing a framework that allows for scaling retail deployments to the hundreds of thousands of nodes with tiered management servers.

Modernize your Point of Service environment while ensuring reliability and stability with SUSE Linux Enterprise Point-of-Service 15 SP2.

• SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 now provides you will predefined configuration templates to help you build SLES 15 SP2 based POS images. With SUSE Manager for Retail’s automated process, you can easily build and deploy these images on POS hardware in the store. Deploying SLEPOS 15 SP2 images in the POS environment enables retailers to bring new hardware and services into the stores, as well as gain stability for your business critical POS infrastructure with a 7.5 years long-term support for this service pack.

How can SUSE Manager for Retail help me in these unprecedented times?

During these uncertain and unprecedented times IT staff volatility has highlighted that when serious IT staff disruption occurs, home grown tools, disparate management products, remote management issues, lack of automation, and inconsistent monitoring and health checks leave IT seriously compromised. A fully leveraged SUSE Manager solution addresses ALL of the above and much more keeping your servers, VMs, containers and clusters secure, healthy, compliant and low maintenance irrespective of where they are deployed Private, Public or Hybrid cloud. Stay Safe.

SUSE Manager 4.1 will be available for download from July 21st 2020

For more information

https://www.suse.com/products/suse-manager/

https://suse.com/c/category/products/suse-manager/

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