City of Nuremberg Optimizes Operation, Maintenance, and Security of Heterogeneous IT Landscape with Operating System Upgrade
 
 

City of Nuremberg Optimizes Operation, Maintenance, and Security of Heterogeneous IT Landscape with Operating System Upgrade

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Nuremberg is the second-largest Bavarian city and fourteenth largest municipality in Germany. With the development of Eastern Europe, the city has profited from its central location within the European economic region. With 500,000 inhabitants, Nuremberg is the economic, professional services, and cultural center of Northern Bavaria, and the center of the Nuremberg Metropolitan Region, with about 2.5 million inhabitants. Since the 1970s, the city has been transformed into an innovative service center with rapid growth in engineering and economic consultancies, market research firms, facilities management service providers, and e-businesses. The many inventions that originated in this city include the first print workshop (1469), photography (1717), and the technology for Shanghai's Transrapid high-speed train (2004).

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from City of Nuremberg

  • "The City of Nuremberg operates a large number of heterogeneous applications on different hardware platforms to meet the complex IT requirements of a large, modern city. We have been relying for years on Oracle Solaris to run our mission-critical applications, and we upgraded to Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 because of Solaris' outstanding stability and reliability." – Dr. Martin Haller, System Management Director, City of Nuremberg

  • Establish the city's financial department with an SAP business warehouse on commodity hardware without modifying its proven IT platform based on Oracle Solaris, Oracle Solaris Cluster, Oracle Solaris Volume Manager, and Oracle Database, operating successfully since 2005
  • Minimize effort required to deploy, operate, and maintain SAP and specialty applications by upgrading to the newest release of Oracle Solaris
  • Maintain high performance and high availability for numerous specialty applications—ranging from motor vehicle licensing to resident registration—and SAP modules used for internal management purposes, such as financials and human resources

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Upgraded to Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 to lay the foundation for optimized operation, maintenance, and security of the city's heterogeneous IT landscape of specialty and SAP applications
  • Relied on the proven system platform, based on Oracle Solaris, Oracle Solaris Cluster, Oracle Solaris Volume Manager and Oracle Database to ensure 24/7 availability of business-critical applications
  • Established an SAP business warehouse for the city's financial department on commodity hardware, namely Sun Fire X4270 M2 and Sun Server X2-4
  • Accelerated time to production by configuring Oracle Solaris 11 for the city's numerous hardware and software platforms with minimal effort and customization, replacing Oracle Solaris configuration scripts partially with the Oracle Solaris' Service Management Facility feature and setting up storage volumes and host-based mirroring easily with Oracle Solaris Volume Manager
  • Deployed two Oracle Solaris Cluster nodes in two geographically separate data centers to ensure business continuity and top performance during public business hours for the benefit of citizens
  • Kept data centers running 24/7 with Oracle Solaris Cluster's advanced software algorithms, which ensure permanent monitoring of servers, network, applications, and storage
  • Allowed automatic recovery of the cluster and applications in failover situations while enabling near-zero downtime maintenance with rolling and dual partition upgrades
  • Maintained high performance and availability of the previous Oracle Solaris release to meet strict requirements for the city's applications, such as traffic surveillance, resident registrations, motor vehicle licensing, SAP NetWeaver, and SAP Business Suite
  • Leveraged new Oracle Solaris features, such as simplified high availability models (failover zones and zone clusters), the repository server's auto install function, and the simplified update mechanism, for rapid configuration and updates to the administration environment
  • Enhanced security by giving system administrators access to specific Oracle Solaris Zones, enabling working in local zones with a better overview of services that prevents critical actions, such as starting or stopping processes, from affecting other zones
  • Reduced system complexity and eased integration with the city's SAP software suite by creating isolated environments that are very easy to configure, are monitored with Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0, and are used for running SAP applications

Why Oracle

"As a municipality with limited budgets, we are focused on sustainable investments, so we do not have to replace hardware every three or four years. That is why we have been relying on Oracle hardware and software for a long time. We highly appreciate the manageability, availability, low-maintenance, and sustainability of Oracle solutions," said Dr. Martin Haller, system management director, City of Nuremberg.

Partner

Oracle Platinum Partner Computacenter AG & Co. oHG is a leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services in Europe. The company delivers on-site services in nearly 60 countries and supplies IT hardware and software to customers in more than 100 countries.

As some software components were not yet officially supported during the early stages of the project, Computacenter implemented the solution in close cooperation with an Oracle presales consultant and Oracle Solaris specialists. The City of Nuremberg, working with its partner and Oracle, successfully deployed its SAP systems on Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0, with Oracle Solaris Zones support, within its projected budget and turnaround time. During the pilot project, the city encountered a few bugs, which the Oracle Solaris team quickly helped to solve.

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