IBM helps the University of Cincinnati move to a modern infrastructure with SAP ERP on System p and DB2

The University of Cincinnati (UC) is one of the top-rated public research universities in the US, and is committed to offering its 35,500 students not only academic excellence, but preparation for a successful life in the wider world. Cooperative Education – where students alternate periods of study with periods of professional work in a complementary field – was invented at UC in 1906, setting an example that has been followed by universities around the world.

With a history of paying closer attention to the wider world than many ivory towers choose to do, UC naturally takes its responsibilities as a 21st century educational institution very seriously. UC understands that reputations are built not only on academic excellence, but on the overall value that the University can offer. In the increasingly competitive higher education marketplace, there can be no excuse for inefficient fiscal management or inflexible administrative processes that make life difficult for staff and students.

The effective delivery of these key financial and administrative services depends on making the right use of IT. UC’s existing IT infrastructure was based around a set of legacy applications, written in COBOL and running on a mainframe. It was becoming increasingly difficult to develop these applications to meet the needs of staff and students, so the University decided to find a new solution.

“The University wanted to find a new suite of software to handle its financial and HR processes – one that would not only provide the flexibility to introduce new functionalities as and when we need them, but that would also help us to align with current best practices,” says Mark Young, Director of the Infrastructure Services Group at the University of Cincinnati. “We also saw this as an opportunity to move these systems off the mainframe and onto a more modern infrastructure.”

Finding a solution

UC sought the opinions of stakeholders across the University community, and evaluated a number of different solutions before choosing to implement SAP ERP Financials and SAP ERP Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, together with the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component to provide data warehousing and analysis.

“We knew that a number of US universities were moving to SAP software, and that it had already been implemented successfully at 150 academic institutions worldwide – which means that there is a strong support group for SAP ERP in the education sector,” explains Dennis Yockey, Associate Vice President – Business Core Systems at UC. “Also, the fact that SAP provides a fully integrated environment, so that data entered into the financial system can be accessed by HR and vice versa, was a compelling argument in its favor.”

Choosing a partner

Having chosen the software, UC needed an implementation partner, and performed a full RFP. IBM Global Business Services came out a clear winner, as the University’s Vice President and CIO, Fred Siff, describes:

“For the Best and Final Offer [BAFO] stage, the other leading contender brought a roomful of management and techie types to meet with us. When it was their turn, IBM was represented by one person, who had been identified as their potential project manager. He alone was far superior to the other roomful – he understood our situation, he was the one who was going to be on the ground, and he was wonderful to talk with.

“That made it a very easy selection process. He became our project manager, stayed with the project over four years, and brought it to a successful conclusion – he proved to be every bit as terrific as he promised to be in the BAFO meeting.”

IBM Global Business Services and Sirius, an IBM Business Partner, helped the experienced in-house team at UC design a blueprint for the SAP application environment that would use as much as possible of the software’s standard functionality, minimizing the need for customization work and helping to align the University’s processes with current best practices. Where customization was necessary – for example, to add grants management functionality – IBM Global Business Services had the resources to complete the work quickly and efficiently.

Mark Young comments: “IBM Global Business Services had a very active role in the project, ensuring that the design of the solution would meet all of our requirements and that the implementation went smoothly. The GBS team also put in a lot of effort with knowledge transfer, ensuring that our staff would be self-sufficient in terms of managing the SAP application environment after the go-live. Thanks to the contribution of GBS and Sirius, as well as our dedicated in-house team, we have been able to meet all of our deadlines for the launch of the new environment.”

Implementing the solution

IBM, Sirius and the UC team implemented the SAP R/3 solution on an IBM System p 670 server, followed by SAP ERP HCM on a System p5 570. Nearly all 7,000 University staff use the HR systems on a self-service basis, while 1,300 power users have access to the whole SAP application environment – and the IBM System p servers have sufficient capacity to provide excellent performance for this large user-base.

The p5-570 has 16 IBM POWER5 processors, offering the benefits of Advanced POWER Virtualization and Virtual I/O. Production, test and development environments for SAP ERP are provided by a total of 16 logical partitions (LPARs) distributed across the two machines.

“Virtualization on the IBM System p platform is a mature and proven technology, helping us utilize the hardware more effectively and increasing price-performance without compromising on reliability,” says Dan Kuhlmann, Manager of the Basis Team at UC. “Features like Virtual I/O, which enables different LPARs to share the same physical network interfaces, minimize expenditure on adapters and cabling, and make it much easier and faster to set up new virtual servers when the need arises.”

Upgrading to POWER6

UC plans to replace the existing System p servers with new IBM POWER6 processor-based System p 570 servers soon, which will enable the University to benefit from IBM’s leading-edge technologies.

“We are very excited about POWER6,” says Dan Kuhlmann. “The ability to move LPARs from one physical machine to another without shutting down the SAP applications is going to make server maintenance much more flexible. In addition, the greater energy efficiency of the new POWER6 chipset will help us reduce electricity costs. Combined with the Live Partition Migration capabilities, which will help us collocate under-utilized LPARs on a single server, this will help us meet our green computing commitments”

Leveraging DB2 and Tivoli

As the database for its SAP application environment, UC chose IBM DB2. The production database for SAP ERP now totals 130 GB, while the data warehouse holds 300 GB. Including the development and test systems, the University’s DB2 landscape holds around 3TB of data.

“IBM and SAP are working together very closely at the moment to make DB2 the database of choice for SAP applications,” explains Mark Young. . “The IBM-SAP roadmap for DB2 is very well-defined, so we were sure it would be the right choice for the foreseeable future. Moreover, from a software licensing point of view, it was much more cost effective than Oracle.”

The University is currently upgrading to DB2 9, which should deliver improved performance and reliability, while giving UC access to a number of leading-edge features such as Deep Compression.

UC has also deployed IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Enterprise Resource Planning (TSM for ERP), which enables simple, incremental backups of the entire SAP software environment from the University’s disk storage systems to its tape library. The software is fully integrated with the SAP applications and the IBM DB2 database, providing simple management of the whole environment. TSM for ERP also supports policy-based hierarchical storage management, enabling frequently accessed data to be stored on high-speed disks, while less important information is diverted to lower-cost storage.

An ideal infrastructure

Thanks to the successful collaboration between IBM Global Business Services, Sirius and UC’s in-house team, the University now has a modern, centralized ERP solution to handle its core HR and financial processes.

Equally, UC has been able to start offloading its aging mainframe onto newer, more cost-effective hardware. In the future, the University hopes to be able to move its student information system off the mainframe too, which will significantly reduce hardware licensing and maintenance costs.

“The IBM System p servers and the DB2 and Tivoli software form an ideal infrastructure for our new SAP applications,” concludes Mark Young. “But our relationship with IBM has delivered much more than just hardware and software. IBM Global Business Services provided a team with the right industry experience and expertise in SAP applications to help us build an environment that will deliver real value for the University.”