German car maker Audi has completed the shell phase of its new 9,000 sq mt data center while at the same time it finished migrating its SAP applications to a private cloud based on IBM Power7 running DB2.
 

Audi will complete the data center in July 2012. It will sit in two basement levels of a building in its home town of Ingolstadt. The basement location will help reduce cooling energy use by half as part of a target to cut IT energy consumption by two thirds. The company’s 2009 energy consumption at its existing three data centers in Ingolstadt was 17 million KWh.
  

Contributing to the efficiency drive are the deployment of lossless transformers and flywheel UPSs which will replace battery backed UPSs currently in operation. 

Klaus Straub, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at AUDI AG, said: "The new building is an important step towards reducing CO2 emissions in IT. We will reduce our annual energy consumption from 2012 to at least a third.‘
 

Audi has also completed migration of its SAP infrastructure to a private cloud based on IBM’s DB2 database running on Power7 servers.

The car maker was cited as a benchmark customer by HP back in 2003 which said Audi was running SAP Xi on dual HP Superdome servers for its application integration after Audi implemented SAP R/3 for finance, controlling and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. 

The IBM based SAP applications system will run Audi's logistics, supplier relationship management and human resources. 

"Along with a very high level of reliability and failure safety the new SAP Infrastructure solution, which we will migrate into a private cloud, substantially lowers energy consumption and proved the implementation being successful," said Audi’s Lorenz Schöberl, head of IT Infrastructure Services. "The DB2 solution’s built-in data compression capability will enable us to save time and reduce costs of storage and archiving."   

The project deal was signed one year ago.


Audi's new building - data center located in the basement
 

"We were able to demonstrate that our combination of Power servers and DB2 decrease the total cost of ownership over the next four years— from a business and technology point of view," said Gunter Fröhlich, IBM Client Manager for Audi. 

Audi is the name behind such iconic cars are the Audi Quattro, AudiTT and super cars such as the Audi R8 Spyder. It also developed the e-tron high performance electronic concept car (main picture).