The Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has selected IBM 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 IBM cloud-ready infrastructure and software from Oracle and Dell products.
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.
Professor Dave Haseman, the UCC director in charge of the data center, said there has been a significant performance improvement with the IBM system.
"Each semester, the university sets up and manages 25 to 30 instances of SAP on its 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 them three hours with the IBM system," Haseman added.
"In addition, the training and technology transfer process with the IBM team has been exceptional. 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.
