MTU Aero Engines GmbH

Success Story

MTU Aero Engines implemented SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server on its high performance computing (HPC) cluster, as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop to provide a powerful and user-friendly front-end for its computer-aided engineering (CAE) systems.

Overview

MTU Aero Engines (MTU) is a leading German manufacturer of engines and engine components for civilian and military aircraft, as well as stationary industrial gas turbines. Providing a complete service, from design through production and marketing to maintenance, MTU employs around 6,700 people worldwide. The company also has subsidiaries across North America and Asia.

Challenge

As a manufacturer of aircraft components, safety is MTU's top priority. To ensure its products are able to withstand the pressures and tensions of flight in all conditions, the company relies on rigorous quality assurance and advanced safety testing.

MTU uses computer-aided engineering (CAE) applications to test its products by modelling their behaviour in different situations. This is processor-intensive, and the company uses a set of clustered servers to handle the workload. To ensure an optimal testing environment, MTU needed an operating system that would run on standardized hardware and deliver outstanding price-performance.

Novell solution

"SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers very high performance, crucial for our compute-intensive engineering applications."

Norbert Diehl
Head of IT
MTU Aero Engines

MTU has deployed SUSE Linux Enterprise Server throughout its organisation, from the high-performance CAE cluster to less powerful servers used to support enterprise applications such as its SAP ERP system.

"We have run our CAE applications under SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for several years," said Norbert Diehl, Head of IT at MTU. "The advantage of Linux is that it can be stripped down to run only the services we need. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server offers excellent performance, crucial for our compute-intensive engineering applications."

The company recently rolled out SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop across a large number of PCs in its network, further increasing standardisation and interoperability, while decreasing the total cost of ownership. Engineers at MTU now run SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on their local PCs, submitting computational tasks to the high-performance grid, which then returns the results for further analysis.

"As an engineering firm, MTU is confident that the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform meets all our requirements in terms of support for compute-intensive processing," said Diehl. "In addition, it gives us a common platform for the whole organisation, helping us to keep management and training as simple as possible - because the server and desktop environments are built on the same software."

MTU has developed a "recycling" strategy to get the best value out of ongoing investments in computer hardware. The company buys new servers every two years for the high-performance CAE cluster, moving the older machines into the less demanding role of running the business applications. As the Linux* platform supports both requirements cost-effectively, MTU can minimise the complexity and management costs of its infrastructure.

"The key benefit of running the same operating system on all our machines is that it enables us to realise cost savings, not just in terms of software licensing, but hardware too," said Diehl. "SUSE Linux Enterprise gives us complete independence in our choice of hardware vendor, so we can always buy the best-value machines at any given time. What's more, Linux offers very high performance on standard x86 processor technology, so we do not need to invest in more expensive proprietary chipsets."

MTU plans to migrate more systems to Linux in the future, including a number of databases and CAD applications currently running on UNIX*. In addition to enabling greater flexibility in the choice of hardware, MTU anticipates that this will deliver improved price-performance.

Results

"By moving towards a single Linux platform for all our systems, we can realise considerable cost savings in both licensing and hardware, while retaining our focus on safety and quality control."

Norbert Diehl
Head of IT
MTU Aero Engines

With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, MTU's 250 engineering users have a highly secure and reliable platform to access CAE applications on the cluster through an easy-to-use graphical interface.

The ability of Linux to co-exist harmoniously with other operating systems allows MTU to easily support all of its internal users. "With Linux and other open source technologies, there is no requirement to change all aspects of the network," said Diehl. "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server gives us the flexibility to choose the most appropriate environment according to the business need."

"We have been running our HPC cluster on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for six years now, and the environment has been 100 percent reliable," said Diehl. "We chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop for the same reason we chose SUSE Linux in the first place - we knew Novell would provide the reliability and easy management we need, as well as top-class support."

With SUSE Linux Enterprise running on both servers and desktop machines, MTU has gained a high-performance environment on low-cost hardware, helping to keep internal costs low while meeting the engineering department's requirements for computing power.

"By moving towards a single Linux platform for all our systems, we can realise considerable cost savings in both licensing and hardware, while retaining our focus on safety and quality control," said Diehl. "In Novell, we have a reliable and responsive partner that can help us maximise performance and minimise costs for IT."