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One of Colombia's largest retailers protects its SAP core with multi-site high availability and recovers it in 3 hours

With IBM PowerHA for IBM i, the chain's 80 TB SAP environment is replicated between data centers in two different cities. Redsis manages the IBM Power infrastructure at both sites, and the solution has been in production for more than three years: the most recent real failover took place in July 2026.

Client

Top-5 Colombian retailer by revenue

Industry

Retail: supermarkets and drugstores

Location

Caribbean region and Bogotá, Colombia

Solution

IBM PowerHA for IBM i

Service line

Continuity & managed services

The client

The client is one of Colombia's five largest retailers by revenue: a Colombian-owned chain headquartered in the Caribbean region that runs hypermarkets, supermarkets and drugstores nationwide. Its scale is measured in numbers that leave no room for downtime: about 420 stores, roughly 4,800 point-of-sale terminals and close to 8,000 SAP users.

At the heart of that operation is SAP on IBM Power with IBM i, backed by an 80 TB database. More than 200 SQL Server databases also run around that core. If SAP stops, so do replenishment, pricing and much of what happens in the stores.

The challenge

The question the chain needed to answer was easy to ask and hard to solve: if the primary data center suffers a major outage, how long until SAP is back, and how much data is lost?

  • Volume: protecting 80 TB of SAP on IBM i requires continuous replication, not periodic copies.
  • Distance: the secondary site had to be in another city, away from the primary site's risks.
  • Recovery time: getting SAP back in days is not acceptable for a chain that sells every single day.
  • Confidence: a recovery plan that has never been executed isn't a plan; it had to be proven for real.

Before and after

Challenge

An 80 TB SAP core

One of the largest databases in the region, supporting the entire national operation, and in need of protection against a major outage.

Today

Multi-site replication with IBM PowerHA

SAP replicated between the Caribbean region and Bogotá, with a 3-hour RTO, a 15-minute RPO and failover proven under real conditions.

The solution

The architecture is built on IBM PowerHA for IBM i, IBM's high availability and disaster recovery solution for the Power platform. PowerHA groups the systems at both sites into a cluster, keeps data replicated and orchestrates a controlled switchover from the primary site to the secondary one, and back.

The 80 TB SAP environment is replicated between the data center in the Caribbean region and a secondary data center in Bogotá. Redsis manages the IBM Power infrastructure at both data centers, and the solution is tested on an ongoing basis so that a switchover is a known procedure, not a leap of faith.

What IBM PowerHA brings to this scenario

  • Multi-site clustering that treats both data centers as a single availability solution.
  • Continuous replication of SAP data to the secondary site.
  • Controlled switchover for planned tests and real incidents alike.
  • Administrative domain that keeps user profiles, configurations and system objects in sync across nodes.
  • Native IBM i integration, with no third-party software layers for the core.

Results

3-hour RTO

Recovery time for the SAP core after a major outage.

15-minute RPO

Maximum data-loss window in replication.

3+ years in production

Continuously tested; the most recent real failover was executed in July 2026.

  • 80 TB on IBM i
  • 420 stores · 4,800 POS
  • 8,000 SAP users
  • 200+ SQL Server databases
  • Managed infrastructure

Why Redsis

Keeping an SAP core available takes more than software: it requires deep IBM Power and IBM i expertise and running the solution every day. With more than 25 years in mission-critical infrastructure across Latin America and IBM Platinum partner status, Redsis designs, implements and manages high availability for the region's most demanding workloads, and works with each client so that switchover testing becomes part of routine operations rather than an exceptional event.

Related case: Redsis also expanded compute and storage for this chain's SAP environment. See how it reached 2 TB of RAM and 321 TB of flash.

Do you know how long it takes to bring SAP back?

Let's talk about designing, running and testing high availability for your IBM i core, with clear RTO and RPO targets.

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