17.08.2009

New Software – same Hardware

By: Michael Zipf

The UCC at the Technical University of Munich is expanding. It now supplies more than 100 European universities and colleges with SAP applications and services.

The humming sound reminds you of an airconditioned hotel room in Hawaii – except it’s quite a lot louder. André Bögelsack is not on vacation, however; he’s at work. Once again, he’s had to make his way down to the small, windowless basement room to sort out a problem. This is where the SAP UCC at the Technical University of Munich houses its servers – and one of them is refusing to boot up. Bögelsack wants to fix the problem right away, otherwise the UCC administrator and his colleagues will be inundated with phone calls from customers that might not be able to use their SAP systems for training courses, lectures, or research work. In the basement, Bögelsack pulls a hard disk from the defective server and slots it into the server directly below.

All he needs to do now, presumably, is switch the cables to be back in business. “Switch the cables? We don’t do that anymore,” says Bögelsack, recalling his early days at the UCC. Today, he manages this mini data center – whose 50 servers run 120 SAP systems – from his laptop. It is more out of habit than necessity that he trots down to the basement once a day to “see how my babies are doing.” The fact that Bögelsack can take a relaxed turn around the basement is due to an infrastructure that relies entirely on virtualization – and lowers costs for everyone involved.

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