Business School Delivers SAP Courses with IBM Cloud
IBM is enabling a cloud-based service for Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee so it can deliver SAP-based courses to students. The business school is using IBM software and hardware to automate and consolidate its data center operations.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is the second SAP University Competence Center to migrate its infrastructure to IBM hardware and software. Prior to using IBM solutions the school was using system from Oracle and Dell products. But these products were not addressing the requirements and thus the school decided to use IBM cloud-ready infrastructure and software that could deliver faster services with lower administration costs and greater energy efficiency.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Technology Innovation (CTI) is a SAP University Competence Center (UCC), according to IBM. CTI hosts a wide range of SAP systems for educational purposes on its campus and virtually to more than 105 universities across North America. IBM notes that 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.”
By Anuradha Shukla
