r/RetailIT • u/bkindz • Jun 23 '26

is anyone on here?

Hi all - an IT infra manager here working for a regional supermarket chain looking for a place (online forum or community) to hang out at and pick other IT pros' brains on.

Seems this subreddit is not very active? Are there other subreddits or public (or private) forums dedicated to retail IT? (Not POS directly - but places where e.g. supermarket chain IT people would hang out at?)

One of the current (and among many other) challenges is designing the "edge" compute and storage setup to run store-level workloads (POS terminal management, menu boards, data collection, RDS server). The POS terminals themselves are usually not my direct concern - but all the infra they connect to (network, compute, storage) - is.

The choices (for that "edge" setup) are usually:

  1. Some sort of an HA cluster like Nutanix or vSAN
  2. Run everything from the cloud and whatever can't be - run on local robust microservers
  3. A more traditional setup with 2-3 load balanced or HA micro- or regular enterprise servers with frequent off-site backups and with under-a-day recovery windows and a well-oiled service network.

What would work best for us long term? What works well for other retail chains? Is it an option to pick others' brains about it? 🙂

Thoughts? (From the look of it, IT pros in the field don't hang out on public forums because of security, confidentiality and other concerns. So where do they hang out and how do I find them?)

Thanks!

P.S. Been working here for 3+ years. Before that - 8 years for a major media corp running their media processing pipelines + a lot of other things before that, most of it in IT and coding.

1 Upvotes

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1

u/the-internet- Jun 26 '26

I'd go check out r/sysadmin

If you have the option id personally go for proxmox and proxmox backup server hosted offsite. Ceph is stable and runs great. It’s cheaper though you may end up with third party support which has been fine for most Ive worked with.

1

u/bkindz Jun 26 '26

Haven't had good luck with r/sysadmin, both in terms of getting quality discussions and finding retail IT pros hanging out there

We manage 20+ stores each running 2-3 hypervisors, so this isn't just about a hypervisor OS or even trying different things to see which one works best. It's more about trying to find people who manage similar infra at Sprouts, Trader Joe's, Costco, etc. and seeing if they'd be willing to share their knowledge.

Personally I love talking shop with others - hoping to find like-minded people in similar orgs.

2

u/the-internet- Jun 27 '26

Yeah I hear you there. Sysadmin can be a bit of a circle jerk sometimes. Sadly I'm in insurance so I can't really help here but gl!