In 2016, the SAP University Competence Center Magdeburg replaced the hardware of its datacenter as planned. This updated included a migration of the old, application-virtualized datacenter with a mixed platform (Intel Xeon x86 / Intel Itanium) to a modern, fully-virtualized datacenter on basis of Intel Xeon / VMware, which we call the UCC Cloud Platform (UCP). This migration included all central SAP UCC systems such as Service Desk, Central User System, SAP EMEA Portal etc. as well as all 150+ customer SAP systems from a big endian to little endian architecture over heterogeneous system copies. Nevertheless, the impact on customer had to be kept as little as possible while regular services and operations such support, curriculum development and evaluation of new SAP products had to continue as usual.

The planning phase of the migration started as early as September 1^st 2014 while the main phase, in which more than half of the UCC’s team was involved, spanned from February 1^st to November 6^th 2016. During this timeframe, 131 SAP NetWeaver based systems as well as numerous non-NetWeaver based systems were migrated, over 600 client copies performed, more the 5.000 emails written and 3.500+ pages of documentation produced in a total of over 1.200 man-days.

With the last customer system successfully migrated on November 6^th 2016, the last internal sub-projects and subsequent works continued until February 1^st 2017. Despite the high complexity, the thus far biggest UCC project was a full success with all goals being reached without significant delay. With the UCP, the SAP University Competence Center Magdeburg is prepared for all upcoming developments and solutions that are to come during the next 5 years! While our customers can now fully enjoy the improved performance of the new datacenter, our infrastructure team is already preparing the next generation of datacenter - the UCP 2.0!