Audi's Strategic Migration to IBM Private Cloud for Enhanced Business Processes

AUDI AG, part of the Volkswagen Group, is a leading global car manufacturer operating in the premium vehicle segment. With three brands – Audi, Lamborghini, and Ducati – the company has eight production plants worldwide and a range that runs from small luxury family cars to high-performance supercars. Audi Group employs more than 65,000 people globally, and delivered more than 1.3 million premium cars to customers in 2011 – the highest output in its corporate history. Audi had implemented SAP® ERP to manage many aspects of its business operations, from human resources and cost control to supply chain and plant maintenance. Over time, the company had expanded its SAP environment to encompass around 100 separate systems, running on 12 HP servers with Oracle databases and an additional 24 HP blades.

AUDI AG, a leading global car manufacturer, was facing stiff competition from low-cost manufacturers developing their own brands. To stay ahead, Audi aimed to create super-efficient business processes. The company had implemented SAP® ERP to manage various aspects of its business operations, from human resources and cost control to supply chain and plant maintenance. Over time, the SAP environment had expanded to around 100 separate systems, running on 12 HP servers with Oracle databases and an additional 24 HP blades. Audi wanted to improve its IT efficiency to reduce capital and operational costs and create a greener infrastructure, aligning with the company’s sustainability strategy. The company also aimed to increase the availability and performance of its SAP systems, making them more scalable and flexible. The IT Services Department at Audi was tasked with helping the company face several broad business challenges, including increasing demands from employees, customers, and suppliers; the need to support new technologies; rising cost pressures; and growing competition.

Audi decided to migrate to a private cloud, building a completely virtualized infrastructure with the ability to add or remove computing capacity on demand. This would solve the immediate issues with the SAP environment and create a new approach to managing and delivering IT services. Audi migrated more than 100 SAP systems from HP-UX with an Oracle database to IBM AIX with IBM DB2. The IBM proposals suggested that the DB2 option would offer significantly better interactive and batch performance and use considerably less disk capacity. Audi moved ahead with the proposed solution from IBM: the creation of a ‘private-cloud ready’ infrastructure with SAP databases on DB2 on four IBM Power® 570 servers and SAP application servers on 21 IBM BladeCenter® PS702 Express servers. The migration process was key to the success of the solution. It was necessary to migrate more than 100 SAP systems from HP-UX to IBM AIX®6.1 and from Oracle 10g to IBM DB2 9.7. The migration was completed in just six months, with no disruption to Audi’s business.

• The migration to IBM's private cloud infrastructure has provided Audi with a robust, high-performance platform for managing its business operations that also offers superb flexibility. The company can now expand and contract its SAP solutions in line with changing patterns of demand, ensuring that it has the right IT resources in place, at the right cost of ownership. The IBM private cloud-ready infrastructure now runs the entire SAP landscape at Audi, serving a lot of business and supporting core business processes. The new infrastructure requires little physical maintenance and is managed by IBM. The cloud concept allows a group of physically separate hardware resources to be orchestrated and managed as a single pool of virtualized resources. As Audi continues to expand the SAP environment, it is also further developing the management of cloud and embedding the new management processes into its organization.

• Storage savings in the range of 50 to 70 percent
• Migration of over 100 SAP systems completed in just six months
• 20 to 40 percent greater energy efficiency projected over four years