IBM today announced that the Sheldon B. Lubar School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee selected IBM software and hardware, including POWER-based servers, to automate and consolidate its data center operations to enable a cloud-based service for delivering SAP-based courses to students.

The school is migrating its data center to workload-optimized IBM POWER7 and System x servers, a XIV storage system, and a DB2 database software to support the SAP program.

"There has been a significant performance improvement with the IBM system," notes professor Dave Haseman, the school's director in charge of the data center that supports the 750 teaching faculty members in the program, in a press release. "Each semester, we set up and manage 25 to 30 instances of SAP on our servers and the set up alone for an SAP client could take up to 24 hours to complete with Oracle. In comparison, it only takes us three hours with the IBM system."

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is the second SAP University Competence Center to migrate its infrastructure to IBM hardware and software.