Case Study: Technical University of Munich achieves scalable, cost-efficient SAP cloud services with IBM Power Systems

SAP University Competence Center at Technical University of Munich

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) faced the challenge of providing reliable, sophisticated SAP cloud services to a global educational community while operating under significant cost pressures from shrinking education budgets. Their SAP University Competence Center needed a future-proof, scalable infrastructure to support a wide range of workloads, from small lectures to large courses with thousands of simultaneous users, all without the resources for a large administrative team.

IBM implemented a solution based on IBM Power Systems E870 and S822 servers with POWER8 processors, IBM XIV Storage, and IBM PowerVM virtualization. This infrastructure, combined with IBM DB2 and SAP HANA databases, enabled TUM to run its SAP landscape with greater efficiency and performance. The results were substantial: provisioning times for new systems were reduced by 80% to just 30 minutes, database sizes were cut by up to 70% with compression, and storage performance improved by up to 600%. This allowed TUM to offer cutting-edge services like SAP S/4HANA without increasing prices for over a decade.

Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Helmut Krcmar

Professor of Information Systems and Academic Director of the UCC