Consolidation of the Audi Mainframe Infrastructure.

Complying with the consolidation efforts within the Volkswagen Group.

The Customer

AUDI AG is one of the most important car manufactures in the world, with factories in seven countries across the globe. Company headquarters are located in Ingolstadt (Germany).

Benefits Realized

Is there a two-for-one deal in today’s business environment?

Successful businesses share an interesting trait: they are able to discover ways to save or recover funds while at the same time improving their operations. In the search to streamline their IT operations, AUDI AG faced an all-too common problem: with factories in seven countries, not to mention operations all over the world, would it be possible to consolidate mainframe operations on a massive scale that would provide immediate and measurable economic

benefits? On the face of it, the solution makes sense: why go on adding server after server to manage distributed systems when one could conceivably manage them from one source?

To determine the answers, Audi turned to us. We have successfully executed international consolidation projects for Volkswagen Group importers in Europe (Germany, Spain, UK, France, Japan and Italy). We also know Audi very well, having already supplied mainframe services for Audi brand members SEAT and Autogerma.

Size Matters – Scale Requires Innovation

A team of more than sixty professionals from the Information Technology and Organization Department (FP Informationstechnologie und Organisation) of Audi and our Data Processing Centre (DPC) in Martorell, Spain managed and executed the project in an environment of close collaboration and mutual confidence for over five months.

We created an innovative system environment to host Audi’s mainframe systems. This solution provides over 2.800 MIPS and 3 TB of disk storage (protected by Raid and mirrored over two independent DPCs). For that, two redundant links ATM of 30 Mbps of broad band each one were used to establish a connection among Martorell and Ingolstadt, thus ensuring excellent response times for end users.

The transfer was carried out with success on Saturday July 31st and on Sunday August 1st of 2004. Service was reestablished on Sunday morning without any perceivable impact for customer activities. In order to transfer the information of the production and development environments of the AUDI AG Data Center to the

DPC in Martorell, we procured air service along with vehicles from Ingolstadt in order to guarantee rapid and safe shipment.

Reliable and Complete Service Management

Thanks to the innovations developed by the project team, Audi’s benefits from the consolidation include: 24x7 operations, z/OS software administration, on-line follow-up, networking and storage management as well as hardware, software and applications change management. Additionally, Audi benefits by a mainframe system of reduced complexity, improved security, and reduced space requirements, all of which represent assets freed for use in other areas of the business – Audi’s main business, building cars.

Finally, mainframe consolidation promises to save Audi over 4 million Euros annually. In today’s environment, such savings are invaluable and could make the difference between profitability and its ugly alternative.