SCIENCE

IBM announced that the Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee selected IBM software and hardware to automate and consolidate its data center operations to enable a cloud-based service for delivering SAP-based courses to students. The school switched its system from Oracle and Dell products to IBM cloud-ready infrastructure and software to deliver faster services with lower administration costs and greater energy efficiency. Specifically, this announcement demonstrates the school's move to a smarter computing environment that will extract greater economics and performance from its technology infrastructure.

As an SAP University Competence Center (UCC), the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Center for Technology Innovation (CTI) acts as an education service provider, hosting a wide range of SAP systems for educational purposes on its campus and virtually to more than 105 universities across North America. SAP software is used to reinforce and supplement classroom content for more than 40,000 students with 1,450 courses per year, preparing them for post-graduation employment. Students from a variety of academic disciplines participate in the program with classes ranging from accounting and information systems to retail merchandising and supply chain management.

In 2009, the school's Sun hardware needed to be updated and when Oracle acquired the company that year, changes in their relationship led the UCC to investigate alternative hardware partners. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee UCC decided to migrate its data center to workload-optimized IBM POWER7 and System x servers, XIV Storage System and DB2 database software to support the SAP program.

"There has been a significant performance improvement with the IBM system," said Professor Dave Haseman, the UCC director in charge of the data center that supports the 750 teaching faculty members in the program. "Each semester, we set up and manage 25 to 30 instances of SAP on our servers and the set up alone for an SAP client could take up to 24 hours to complete with Oracle. In comparison, it only takes us three hours with the IBM system."

"In addition, the training and technology transfer process with the IBM team has been exceptional," continued Haseman. "They are willing to be adaptable and are quick to share better ways of doing things and transfer as many skills as possible to us."

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is the second SAP University Competence Center to migrate its infrastructure to IBM hardware and software. The University Competence Center at Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) in Germany offers educational institutions and their students throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa access to SAP applications and services for research and teaching assignments. The Center at TUM, led by Professor Krcmar, supports more than 28,000 students at 153 universities with IBM POWER7 servers, XIV Storage System and DB2 database software. TUM migrated in 2010 and the universities are collaborating to optimize technical performance and design innovative approaches to the curriculum.