Speed That Pays Off: How Migrating to IBM Power Saves Businesses from Collapse During Peak Loads

3 seconds. That’s the average amount of time a modern customer is willing to wait for a catalog page to load or a transaction to process. If the system takes longer to “think,” the customer simply goes to a competitor.

In the world of large-scale e-commerce, retail, and finance, the speed of IT infrastructure directly translates into profit. But the real test for systems comes during peak load periods: Black Friday, major holiday sales, or the close of a financial quarter. That’s when infrastructure built on standard off-the-shelf servers often can’t handle the load and crashes.

The Challenge: When Business Scale Becomes an IT Disaster

Imagine a classic scenario: you’re a company processing millions of requests every day. Your heavy-duty enterprise system (such as SAP ERP) is trying to synchronize inventory levels across dozens of warehouses in real time, process payments, and update customer data.

During the extreme traffic spikes of Black Friday, standard x86 servers “choke” due to a lack of throughput. The website starts to “freeze,” transactions fail on the first attempt, and checkout systems in brick-and-mortar stores freeze up. Instead of record-breaking profits, the company ends up with angry customers, abandoned shopping carts, and millions in losses due to lost revenue.

Businesses need more than just “another server”; they need a fail-safe architecture capable of “processing” extreme data volumes without any delay.

The Solution: Processing Power Built for Demanding Databases

To resolve performance and stability issues once and for all, market leaders are migrating their mission-critical databases to IBM Power servers.

Unlike standard general-purpose processors, the IBM Power architecture was designed from the ground up to handle the most demanding enterprise workloads. A single IBM Power processor core can process many times more data streams simultaneously, while ultra-fast memory ensures lightning-fast access to information.

Case Study: Black Friday and 9 Million Transactions a Day (The Salling Group’s Experience)

A striking example of this transformation is the experience of the Salling Group — Denmark’s largest retailer, which operates more than 1,500 stores and powerful online platforms.

Every day, the company processes a colossal amount of data — over 9 million transactions. For a business of this scale, seasonal spikes such as Black Friday turn into a true crash test for the IT infrastructure. During these periods, the load increases rapidly, and every second of delay in synchronization between offline cash registers and the online store can lead to a logistics collapse or payment failures.

To guarantee 100% uninterrupted operation during the most intense peak loads, Salling Group deployed its architecture based on SAP ERP and the IBM Db2 database management system, choosing powerful IBM Power servers as its foundation.

The results are impressive:

• Absolute stability during peak seasons (less than 2 hours of downtime per year). Thanks to IBM Power’s load-balancing capabilities, the company has reduced downtime to an incredibly low level. Less than two hours of total downtime per year for a system that withstands the extreme loads of Black Friday is the benchmark for enterprise-level reliability.
• Annual cost savings of $520,000. The transition to more powerful servers enabled the consolidation of the IT landscape. Fewer physical servers mean significant reductions in software licensing costs (which are often billed based on the number of cores) and administration costs.
• Environmental sustainability and ESG standards. IBM technologies support the Salling Group’s sustainability strategy: 96% of hardware is reused or recycled, significantly reducing the data center’s carbon footprint.

More Than Just Retail: Why This Matters for Every Industry

The Salling Group case study brilliantly illustrates the challenges facing retail, but the issue of extreme workloads is universal. For the Ukrainian financial sector, large banks, or enterprise-level organizations, their own “Black Friday” could strike at any moment.

These include days of mass payroll disbursements, tax filing periods, month-end closings, or a sudden surge in user activity in mobile banking. At such moments, transactional databases and anti-fraud systems operate at their absolute limits. IBM Power architecture gives businesses that much-needed margin of safety—a guarantee that even if the number of requests suddenly increases by 5, 10, or 20 times, your key services won’t “crash,” and customers won’t even notice that the system is under excessive pressure.

From "Hardware" to Business Advantage

Your customers don’t know, and shouldn’t have to know, what servers are in your data center. But they certainly notice how fast and reliably your service performs during the busiest days of the year.

As an official IBM Gold Partner, Solidity is ready to help your business prepare for any scale. We design and implement IBM Power-based solutions so that your IT infrastructure becomes your key competitive advantage—not a “bottleneck” during periods of peak demand.