Stirling University has improved performance three-fold
and lowered project costs by moving its SAP human resources and
payroll system over to Linux.
The university decided to migrate to a two-tier system, with the
SAP application tier on HP Proliant Servers running Red Hat
Enterprise Linux after the performance of its system had slowed
following two upgrades.
The database tier was migrated to HP Integrity Servers based on
Intel's 1.3GHz Itanium 2 processors.
"The Integity systems offered better price/performance than
comparable Risc-based systems, with the added bonus that we will
maintain flexibility in choosing any operating system in the
future," said Martyn Peggie, HR IS manager at Stirling
University.
“We can choose HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Windows. This
will allow us to adapt to changing requirements over the years to
come," he added. "We believe that with the current configuration
of the IT systems, the servers will pay for themselves over the
next three years just by savings in support costs."
Since 1990, campus computing has been built on HP technology.
When Stirling University decided to deploy SAP for HR and payroll,
it did so on HP9000 servers running HP-UX 11.0. However,
performance began to suffer after several upgrades. At certain
times of the month, when heavy reporting was taking place, the
system ran very slowly, causing significant inconvenience to
users.
After the migration to Red Hat Linux the payroll run-time was
reduced from 80 minutes to 12 minutes, and users were able to work
normally during the run. The use of commodity application servers
meant the project costs were much lower, according to Peggie.