SAP University Competence Center (UCC)

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A joint effort between Sun Microsystems, SAP AG, and the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the SAP University Competency Center (UCC) is known as a "private/public" partnership project. The goal of the UCC is to help faculty members teach students how technology can enable integrated business processes and strategic thinking. As partners, SAP supplies software, Sun supplies hardware and software, and TUM provides office space and a datacenter in which to house the systems. Sun and SAP both offer support and training for their respective products. Using these advanced systems for teaching and research, the faculty at TU and more than 400 affiliated European universities can provide clear, interactive demonstrations of business processes rather than purely theoretical lectures. With state-of-the-art systems, lecturers are better equipped to teach technical content, such as software design and architecture.

The SAP UCC ran only SAP ERP when it opened but later added various SAP Business Suite tools and applications. Now, the UCC operates nearly 100 SAP applications, including SAP R/3, SAP ERP, Netweaver Solution Manager, SAP for Banking, and SAP for Healthcare. All of these applications run on 145 Sun servers, including Sun Fire V210, V240, V40z, V880, and V890 servers; Sun Fire T2000 servers, Sun Fire X4200 and X4200 M2 servers, and Sun Blade 6000 and 8000 Modular Systems. Sun storage solutions provide more than 90 TB of storage capacity.

Managing a fluctuating user load is one of the challenges SAP UCC faces by running commercial programs like SAP in an academic environment. In an enterprise setting, SAP applications would exhibit a relatively high load during normal working hours. "The exception is more the rule for us," says Dr. Holger Wittges, executive director of SAP UCC. "There are times during the working week when only a few users are accessing one system or another. This is simply because hardly any big lectures or tutorials are taking place." At other times, three or four training sessions might occur at the same time with 60 to 80 participants simultaneously accessing, for example, SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI).

Taking into account these unique load characteristics, SAP UCC decided two years ago to virtualize its Sun servers to optimize system utilization. The aim was to install multiple systems on extremely powerful hardware such as the Sun Fire X4600 server - one of the first servers to offer AMD Opteron 8-way dual-core processors. The Sun Fire X4600 server delivered an excellent cost/performance ratio and made it possible for SAP UCC to consolidate hardware, further reducing its costs.

In a separate project, SAP UCC installed existing SAP ERP solutions in a 3-tier architecture. For tier 1 clients, SAP UCC uses Sun Ray desktops and workstations with a Java front end, and Windows computers with an SAP GUI. Tier 2 application servers are primarily AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire X4440 servers and Sun Blade 6000 and 8000 Modular Systems running AMD, Intel, and SPARC processors-based server modules. Finally, SAP UCC uses SPARC-based systems such as Sun Fire T2000, Sun Fire V880, and Sun Fire V890 servers for its tier 3 database servers.

Using Solaris Containers to isolate independent applications and services, SAP UCC now operates as many as 24 SAP ECC (ERP Central Component) systems in parallel on three Sun Fire X4440 servers and one Sun Fire V890 server. The IT environment has proven to be completely stable with as many as 120 client systems.

Given these successes, SAP UCC is now tackling the challenge of storage. Current SAP ECC 5.0 and 6.0 systems require almost twice the amount of storage space as previous systems. SAP UCC now extensively uses network attached storage (NAS) running on Sun X4500 servers which are being used as NFS servers. Experts at SAP UCC are in the process of distributing the SAP installations so that, with Sun virtualization solutions, SAP UCC can utilize low-cost NAS drives. SAP UCC is systematically using its own test environment to assess the performance of NAS when combined with various hardware architectures and software virtualization solutions. Although NAS is slower than SAN, it performs well and costs a fraction of what a SAN does, offering SAP UCC significant savings.

SAP UCC is not alone in benefiting from these projects. Students and lecturers at TU and affiliated universities use the most progressive and innovative hardware and software to explore practical teaching methods. In turn, the Technical University of Munich is delighted that it can offer attractive hosting solutions to other universities. Finally, SAP and Sun benefit by having a partner in the educational community to help further develop their products.