Although a favorite buzzword, "cloud" is a lot more than hot air. SAP is currently implementing cloud computing as the infrastructure for training courses. In a year-long project, KPS and Global IT teams collaborated to migrate most of the SAP Education training systems to a cloud infrastructure.

By Marina Titova

SAP Education offers internal and external SAP training courses for consultants, users, and developers. Up to 500 of these courses are held each week at training centers or as virtual training classes.

Whether participants attend courses in a classroom or on their PC, they must all be able to access the course content and training systems fast, efficiently, and smoothly at the scheduled time. Looking after this environment is no easy task for the Global IT Infrastructure Management team, which operates the underlying infrastructure and is responsible for maintaining the training and demo systems.

Off with the old and on with the new

Since most course content remains the same for lengthy periods and many courses are regularly held in the same form (for example, basic courses for SAP NetWeaver and SAP ERP), once a course has been prepared, it is copied and reused until it has to be revised.

Virtualization... extends beyond server operations and can be described in general terms as the abstraction of resources. Resources can include hardware, software or a logical component (such as an IP or other access address). In addition to the virtualization of computers in virtual machines (known as virtual computing), this technology has many other uses at all levels of the IT infrastructure, such as virtual networks (VLAN). An entire data center can be virtualized. Hypervisor software enables several virtual machines plus the operating system to run in parallel on a single physical server system. This means that data center operators can significantly reduce the number of physical server units required - as many as five, ten, twenty, or more small virtual machines will often fit on a large physical server.

In technical terms, a master image is created once for each course and then distributed as needed. Previously, these images were reset at the weekend so course participants could work on their own "fresh" training systems the following week.

SAP Education used to run the training systems on conventional physical servers. This practice was associated with constraints: Some training systems only ran on certain hardware configurations or required a specific setup.

The copying and refresh process at the weekend was complex, because the images could not just be copied from one server to another. As a result, short-term requests for particular training systems could not be met, although hardware capacity was available. Moreover, courses were charged by the week, regardless of whether they lasted two, three, four, or five days; there was no process for billing for flexible training periods.

Cloud computing proved to be the best solution for SAP Education's requirements, and courses were migrated to the cloud, in other words, transferred from a physical environment to a virtual one.

"The training systems had to be available at short notice and at all times," says Pero Jurisic, who managed the project for KPS Education. "We needed more flexibility and dynamic sessions, and wanted to reduce our costs and make them easier to forecast."

There was no suitable out-of-the-box solution: Data security and data protection had to be guaranteed and dependency on third-party providers avoided.

Collaborating to address challenges

In the initial phase, both of the teams involved in the project - KPS Education and Global IT Infrastructure Management - looked at whether the technical capabilities matched the processes and requirements.

One of the key issues was determining what technical capabilities would be required to handle up to 2,000 different training courses. Close communication, mutual support, and cross-team cooperation played a key role in helping the teams adapt SAP Education's requirements to the technological options and capabilities.

The project is scheduled for successful completion in the next two months. "We are still optimizing the refresh process and we also want to maximize utilization of the infrastructure," says Tilo Breining, head of the Global IT Infrastructure Service team.

Cost and time savings

The cloud solution has made SAP Education much more flexible because resources are now allocated and released dynamically. Virtual images are nearly always available as required. Claus-Henning Cappell, project lead for the infrastructure, sees this as a great advantage. "Virtualization enables us to respond flexibly to customer requirements and to design images on demand." Operations are no longer limited to specific physical servers - the whole hardware pool can be used on a variable basis.

"The requirements were wide-ranging and we collaborated very closely to meet them. The results speak for themselves." adds Pero.