Stirling University has moved its SAP payroll and human resources (HR) system to an open source Red Hat Linux operating system.

The university implemented the Red Hat system when the server running the HR department’s SAP application started to suffer performance problems following an upgrade.

Martyn Peggie, HR information systems manager at Stirling University, says that prior to the Linux migration, the system often ran slowly, particularly at times of heavy reporting activity.

‘We went with Red Hat because it offered stronger support and stability for our SAP HR system than the SAP application server,’ he said.

Red Hat was recommended and supplied by Abtech Computer Services UK, which has completed a number of similar projects for Stirling University.

As well as increasing performance threefold, the new system is 50 per cent cheaper to run than its predecessor.

Costs of £4,500 a year for running the university’s previous Risc-based server have fallen to £2,600 for an HP system with Red Hat as a replacement. In addition, the payroll runtime for Stirling’s 2,000 teaching and support staff has been reduced from an hour and 20 minutes to just 12 minutes.

‘We can turn tasks around much faster, and the support cost advantages that we have gained have been very significant,’ said Peggie.