Lufthansa Systems: Efficient and Cost-Effective Management of SAP Environments

[Former Member]

"Lufthansa Systems takes off with more than 1,000,000 SAPs on Fujitsu FlexFrame and SUSE Linux.”

The presentation, YouTube Video, held at SUSE’s booth at SAPPHIRE 2014 in Orlando. Visitors learned that the Lufthansa subsidiary, which specializes in IT services, systematically relies on Fujitsu’s dynamic infrastructures solution – FlexFrame – when it comes to operating business-critical SAP applications for its customers. The SAP system used by Lufthansa to maintain its fleet of aircraft was recently migrated entirely to the SUSE-Linux-based FlexFrame platform.

The results were comprehensive – as emphasized by the speaker: “Following migration, Lufthansa noticed a considerable improvement in SAP system performance at reduced costs.” Visitors to SAPPHIRE were able to see the root of this success, with a closer look at the Fujitsu FlexFrame infrastructure, which uses virtualization techniques to leverage its key benefits. As the first adaptive computing platform to be certified by SAP, FlexFrame for SAP comprises a pool of physical and virtual servers, a central storage system, a control center, and a network that links all components together. All of the software components – such as the SUSE operating system, SAP applications, and databases – are located centrally on the storage system and can be assigned dynamically to the existing hardware resources.

With the FlexFrame Orchestrator, Fujitsu offers a new version of the platform that supports rapid implementation of SAP innovations, such as SAP HANA, thus preparing the company for future business requirements.

The FlexFrame Orchestrator offers the following benefits: 

• Simplifies the management of SAP applications and SAP HANA
• Increases agility and helps to drive innovation and change
• Dramatically reduces infrastructure costs
• Provides an ideal basis for all deployment models of SAP 
• Improves quality of service

With SUSE Linux, the FlexFrame infrastructures run on one operating system that supports Fujitsu’s service architecture efficiently and reliably – the two companies have a long-standing close partnership. “We already have over 300 FlexFrame customers, including a number of hosters such as Lufthansa Systems with several hundred servers, but also smaller corporate customers,” summed up by the speaker at SAPPHIRE. Practical experience has shown that FlexFrame can reduce management costs in SAP environments by more than 50 percent. Even customers that grew quite significantly in recent years have never had to expand the administration team that supports FlexFrame, despite intensified IT usage.

For more information: YouTube Video "Lufthansa Systems takes off with more than 1,000,000 SAPs on Fujitsu FlexFrame and SUSE Linux.”