Business opportunity
A global steel producer previously had an IT strategy based on operating its own data centers. To drive operational efficiency, the company decided to migrate a number of x86 architecture systems to Microsoft Azure cloud.
Having decided to keep its mission-critical SAP® ERP applications running in its own data centers, the company was interested in enhancing its disaster-recovery (DR) options for this environment. Eliminating its existing dependency on its own physical IT infrastructure would help the company ensure rapid recovery for the SAP® applications in the event of unexpected downtime.
Technical challenge
The company’s SAP® applications runs on the IBM AIX operating system with on-premises IBM Power servers. As AIX runs only on Power, and not on the vastly more common x86 architecture, the SAP® applications could not be migrated to standard Microsoft Azure resources.
The company set out to find a partner capable of supporting its AIX-based systems on Azure. The business-critical nature of these systems made it imperative to build and maintain an exact duplicate of the on-premises environment, so that the company could be certain of successful recovery in a disaster scenario.
Our solution
To streamline the cloud transformation journey, one of the company’s technology partners suggested the company use Kyndryl Skytap on Azure as a disaster recovery solution for its business-critical SAP environment.
Together, the manufacturing company and the Kyndryl Skytap team enabled the company to replicate its full SAP production environment on Azure in its native format, giving the company peace of mind that data and applications are always accessible.
Working with Kyndryl, Microsoft, and a local systems integration partner, the manufacturing company successfully migrated its on-premise SAP® applications, migrating seven AIX LPARs to Kyndryl Skytap.
What progress looks like
The migration to Skytap on Azure achieved the company's primary objective—to provide a rapid disaster recovery solution for its business-critical SAP® applications in the event of a failure of on-premise systems. With these workloads successfully migrated to Azure, the company has improved its disaster recovery readiness while minimizing its dependency on local physical infrastructure. In addition, its Azure-based DR environment for SAP® is highly scalable, flexible and cost-efficient.
- Easy integration with existing Azure account
- Predictable cloud costs
- Boosted disaster-readiness