Luxury car maker Audi has announced it is migrating its SAP infrastructure to the cloud.
The company has signed an agreement with IBM to build and manage a private cloud, located in Audi’s own data centre in Igolstadt, Germany, based on a new generation of high-performance IBM POWER 7 Servers and IBM database technology (DB2).
Audi’s existing IT infrastructure had reportedly been facing major reliability and flexibility challenges from the increased use of business-critical applications in areas including production and logistics, supplier relationship management and human resources
The deal builds on the car manufacturer’s existing relationship with IBM. IBM had already been employed to rebuild Audi’s existing SAP infrastructure, including consolidation and virtualization of the server hardware, process standardisation, opportunities for performance-related billing and a much higher operational flexibility. Now that’s headed to Audi’s own private cloud.
Audi’s head of IT infrastructure services, Lorenz Schöberl, said the company had been impressed with the “very high level of reliability and failure safety” with IBM’s SAP infrastructure solution, which had also reduced energy consumption.
The new infrastructure is fully operational and will be managed by IBM in a private cloud environment hosted in Audi’s data centre over the next four years.
