Audi recently selected IBM to build a cloud environment for Audi's SAP infrastructure to deliver provisioning of SAP applications and capacities, potentially lower infrastructure costs, and deliver energy efficiency with the opportunity to enlarge future SAP applications.

Audi was facing challenges to scale its IT systems by the increased use of business-critical applications in areas such as production and logistics, supplier relationship management, and human resources, which challenged their IT infrastructure's reliability and flexibility.  

Audi has signed on with IBM to rebuild its existing SAP infrastructure, including consolidation and virtualization of the server hardware, process standardization, opportunities for performance-related billing, and a higher operational flexibility. Audi's SAP Infrastructure solution is based on a new generation of high-performance IBM POWER7 servers and IBM database technology (DB2).

"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 lowering energy consumption," said Lorenz Schoberl, head of IT infrastructure services for Audi. "The DB2 solution's built-in data compression capability will enable us to save time and reduce costs of storage and archiving."  

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

The new infrastructure is fully operational and will be managed by IBM in a private cloud environment hosted in Audi's data center.