Case Study: SPAR achieves rapid IBM Power Systems migration and instant disaster recovery with Skytap on Azure

Meridian and Skytap Migrate SPAR’s IBM Power Systems to Skytap on Azure So It Can Keep Delivering Quality Products

SPAR, the world's leading voluntary food retail chain with more than 13,000 stores and 14 million daily customers, faced an urgent threat when civil unrest in South Africa put its on‑premises data center and mission‑critical IBM Power Systems at risk and engineers could not access the site. With store connections, supply chains, and customer food deliveries endangered, SPAR needed an immediate, fully remote solution to protect operations and data.

Meridian and Skytap rapidly migrated SPAR’s 10 IBM i LPARs to Skytap on Azure using Meridian’s mPowerCloud Migration Factory™ and mProtect Flex™ (powered by Commvault), implementing live replication and an instantaneous failover recovery point. The quick, remote migration preserved continuity of service, enabled continued modernization of IBM Power workloads, and converted disaster‑recovery costs into an operational model so SPAR can keep delivering products without interruption.

SPAR

Greg Hay

Group Technology Operations and IT Executive