Business opportunity

A global lifestyle apparel company recently spun off from a larger holding corporation. When the company was divested, it faced a strict deadline for exiting the previous owner’s data centers and implementing its own global infrastructure.

Although the deadline for achieving technological independence was challenging, the company saw the data-center exit as an opportunity to modernize its infrastructure, reduce technical debt, and push ahead on its cloud journey. In particular, the company aimed to explore cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) for its SAP^® Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and distribution systems.

Technical challenge

The apparel company was running its SAP^® ERP and distribution-management applications on the IBM AIX and IBM i operating systems on IBM Power hardware. Wary of immediately migrating these mission-critical systems to the cloud, the company wanted to replace just the on-premises DR solution with a cloud-based option. It anticipated that the experience gained would ultimately give it the skills and confidence to move the production environments to the cloud.

With the deadline for its data-center exit looming, the company was under pressure to find and validate a cloud-based DR solution for IBM Power.

Our solution

The apparel company researched leading hyperscalers and chose Microsoft Azure as its destination cloud. This enabled it to select Kyndryl Skytap on Azure as its DR solution for IBM Power. Kyndryl Skytap, which the apparel company referred to as “the only real viable option” for IBM Power on the cloud, allowed it to replicate its IBM AIX and i applications without refactoring or replatforming.

Together, the company and Kyndryl accelerated its adoption of cloud, avoiding the need for costly changes to systems. It also reduced migration risk and enabled the company to benefit from the global availability, scalability and flexibility of Azure.

The power of partnership

Kyndryl’s close partnership with Microsoft helped the apparel company successfully pursue its cloud-first DR strategy for IBM Power with minimal change and risk.