About MTU Aero Engines
MTU Aero Engines is Germany's leading manufacturer of engines and engine components for civilian and military aircraft, as well as stationary industrial gas turbines. Headquartered in Munich, and with subsidiaries in Germany, North America and Asia, MTU employs around 7,500 people, and has annual sales of over €2.7 billion.
Challenge
For several years, MTU had been running its computer-aided engineering (CAE) solvers on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The solutions are used for a variety of tasks, for example, to model the behaviour of aircraft components for safety testing, or to simulate the complex fluid dynamics within turbo engines. MTU was impressed by the flexibility and stability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, as well as its ability to deliver good performance even on relatively inexpensive hardware.
"Outside of the CAE computation environment, we were running our CAE desktop, CAD/CAM, and SAP ERP systems on a mixture of high-end UNIX platforms - Sun Solaris, SGI IRIX and so on," said Dr. Thomas Kronseder, Head of Unix AdminCourt at MTU. "The licensing costs were high, and the proprietary hardware was expensive. We realized that if we could standardize our entire infrastructure on a Linux platform, we would be able to realize very significant cost savings."
Novell Solution
The systems that the Munich-based engine manufacturer wanted to migrate from UNIX to Linux were business-critical, so the company needed assurance that its new platform would provide very high levels of availability.
"Our SAP environment manages all our logistics, and if it were to suffer significant downtime, our business would be severely affected," said Norbert Diehl, IT Team Leader at MTU. "We needed a Linux distribution that offered professional technical services and we did not want to rely entirely on community support. The most realistic options were SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We had experience with SUSE Linux Enterprise already from our HPC environment, so it was an easy decision to make."
In addition to its 1,800-core HPC environment, MTU is now running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on more than 200 servers, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on 750 desktop PCs. The Oracle databases supporting several business processes are now running in the new environment, and the SAP ERP systems are being migrated this year. The company's custom-built CAD/CAM and product lifecycle management (PLM) applications are also running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
The company's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server environment is running on a hardware infrastructure consisting of physical x86 and IA64 servers as well as virtual instances.
"We are no longer tied to specific hardware vendors for individual systems, which is a great advantage," said Dr. Kronseder. "We usually order servers in bulk, and since we now have numerous vendors competing for the contract, we are in a much stronger position to negotiate favourable prices."
Further cost savings will be achieved through the choice of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop for 750 users in the engineering department. The operating system provides a highly secure and reliable front-end, giving users client access to the CAD/CAM systems and the HPC environment. When these users need access to Microsoft Windows applications such as Outlook and Office, these are delivered through Citrix - providing a common office environment within MTU.
"We have also developed our own imaging system which allows us to set up new desktop client machines on a plug-and-play basis," said Diehl. "Again, the key is standardisation: the client PCs run only the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop operating system, with all the applications and data being delivered via NFS. This means we have an extremely uniform environment with no software installed locally, which simplifies maintenance."
Results
MTU is on target to achieve its goal of being 'UNIX-free' by 2010. By standardising all its major systems on SUSE Linux Enterprise, the company will be able to manage its entire infrastructure with just six Linux administrators - with no need to maintain in-house skills for other operating systems.
"We are very satisfied with SUSE Linux Enterprise and the support we receive from Novell," said Diehl. "Standardising on this platform is an excellent way to reduce the complexity of IT management and improve reliability across the whole infrastructure. With a strong in-house team, a simple architecture and a single vendor providing support, we are generally able to resolve issues quickly and effectively - giving us a reliable, high-performance infrastructure at a low cost."