Introducing MTU Aero Engines
MTU Aero Engines AG is Germany’s leading engine manufacturer and a global player in the industry. The company develops, manufactures, markets and supports commercial and military aircraft engines of all thrust and power categories, as well as stationary industrial gas turbines. MTU components are currently installed in one-third of the world’s commercial aircraft.
The company has grown significantly in recent years. In 2019, MTU Aero Engines was admitted to the German Stock Index (DAX), making it one of the 40 most valuable stock corporations in Germany. MTU Aero Engines, headquartered in Munich, has an international presence with 18 locations and more than 11,000 employees.
At-a-Glance
MTU Aero Engines, a leading manufacturer of aircraft engines, has set an ambitious goal to help slow global warming: by 2050, it aims to offer engines for climate-neutral aviation. To achieve this goal, the company has relied on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for over 20 years to develop highly efficient engines and improve the predictive accuracy of its simulations. Now with the help of Rancher Prime, it’s accelerating its pace of innovation with agile application architectures and next-generation security features.
Reducing aviation emissions to zero
MTU Aero Engines has set itself an ambitious goal for the future: by 2050, it wants to offer engines for climate-neutral aviation and thus contribute to slowing global warming.
To achieve this goal, the company increased its research into revolutionary propulsion concepts and has already made significant progress. Its geared turbofan engine family, developed with partner Pratt & Whitney, reduces fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by around 16% compared to the previous models. As a result, airlines have saved more than 10 million tons of CO2 with this innovation since 2016.
“To develop even more efficient engine concepts, we have to process and analyze huge amounts of data every day,” says Dr. Thomas Kronseder, head of the Linux team at MTU Aero Engines. “Today, the simulation of airflows in an engine requires an enormous amount of computing power. In addition, we have to provide new applications for our highly digitalized production processes faster than ever before. Ultimately, only with the right IT technologies can we make our vision of climate-neutral aviation a reality.”
“More than 20 years ago, we were the first large industrial company in Germany to build a Linux cluster based on SLES. Since then, open source technology has become a key element of our corporate strategy. The results we have achieved together with SUSE since then show that our decision was exactly right.”
High-performance computing with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
In 2002, MTU Aero Engines set up a high-performance infrastructure for its computationally intensive simulations. The initial cluster architecture consisted of 64 standard Dell Technologies rack servers, each with two Intel Pentium III processors and 144GB of SDRAM. The IT team selected SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as the operating system.
According to Kronseder, “The Linux cluster gave us an excellent price-performance ratio and was 2.5 to 3 times more cost-effective than comparable UNIX-based supercomputing solutions.”
In addition to the low total cost of ownership and high availability, the ease with which the system could be expanded was also convincing. Within six months, the first cluster’s performance doubled. Today, MTU Aero Engines’ high-performance infrastructure encompasses 1,500 servers running SLES and delivers 2.6 petaflops or 2.6 quadrillion calculations per second.
“With this computing power, which is on par with the TOP500 supercomputers worldwide, we have drastically increased the predictive accuracy of our simulations and can now accurately assess how individual components will behave in specific situations,” says Tobias Opel, IT planner for computer-aided engineering (CAE), high performance computing (HPC) and Linux clients at MTU Aero Engines.
After successfully deploying the high-performance cluster, MTU Aero Engines also migrated its engineers’ workstations to SLES. The company now runs about 800 Linux clients with the SUSE operating system. These clients run various CAE applications for developing future engine concepts.
Enterprise applications on SLES
“The third pillar of our Linux infrastructure is enterprise IT,” explains Kronseder. “Today, a significant part of MTU’s enterprise backend runs on SLES. This includes classic ERP applications, SAP HANA solutions, Oracle systems and Siemens Teamcenter for product lifecycle management.”
MTU Aero Engines began migrating its enterprise applications from UNIX to SLES in 2003, and within a few years, it had moved some of its largest and most powerful systems to the Linux platform. During the migration, the IT team relied on architectures that had previously been developed within the HPC environment.
“We were able to leverage a lot of the knowledge we had gained in the HPC and client environment to the enterprise world,” says Kronseder. “The two most important guidelines were an image-based installation and the consistent separation of machine-independent application and local operating system installation through the use of centralized storage. Both enforce root-free installation and operation of applications, which is in line with classic UNIX thinking, but requires discipline on the part of the independent software vendors.”
MTU Aero Engines’ enterprise environment now includes almost 1,000 servers, including both virtualized systems and bare-metal machines. To manage these resources, the IT team implemented a cloud-like management framework years before the term, “cloud,” was in common use. In this environment, the team can distribute and operate services of varying sizes across servers with high availability.
Modernizing with containers and Rancher Prime
Twenty years after deploying its first Linux servers, MTU Aero Engines has adopted a new technology with SUSE, containerized IT. “We were initially reluctant to jump on the container bandwagon because the setup seemed very complex and some of the technologies didn’t seem fully mature,” says Kronseder. “But as more and more requests came in from business departments related to containers and Kubernetes, we decided to take a closer look at the topic.”
MTU’s IT team evaluated the major Kubernetes management platforms on the market and ultimately chose Rancher Prime. Its ease of use, broad feature set and 100% open source orientation convinced the team. In addition, the company’s long-standing relationship with SUSE played an important role in the decision.
“Rancher Prime made it much easier for us to enter the container world,” says Opel, who is now responsible for the container topic at MTU Aero Engines. “Creating a Kubernetes environment from scratch would have been a significant undertaking. With Rancher Prime, however, we were able to dramatically reduce the implementation time and deploy the first clusters within a few weeks.”
The IT team turned to an independent IT system house and to SUSE Global Services to help plan the environment and deploy the first systems.
“SUSE provided us with 25 hours of consulting services that really helped us set up our first environment,” says Opel. “Together with the SUSE consultants, we developed solutions that met our business needs exactly. In addition, the SUSE consulting team helped us remove friction and get the infrastructure up and running in a very short time.”
MTU Aero Engines’ Kubernetes infrastructure now consists of three production clusters, four test clusters and one development cluster.
The impact of Rancher Prime
Efficient IT operations at every level
MTU Aero Engines’ entire Kubernetes environment is now managed by the same team that manages the company’s Linux infrastructure. In total, less than 10 specialists are responsible for the administration and strategic development of the two platforms.
“This is only possible because we have organized our IT operations extremely efficiently,” says Kronseder.
In detail, all Linux servers at MTU use the same SLES base image, regardless of whether they are simple virtual machines with one processor core or high-end servers with eight processors and 12 terabytes of RAM. The 800 developer workstations also run the same operating system code base – the only difference being an added desktop interface.
“Our principle is always to keep things simple,” says Opel. “Rancher Prime helps us apply this principle to our container environment. With this solution, we can manage all of our Kubernetes clusters from a central interface and easily keep them up to date. We can roll out updates to the entire environment with just a few clicks. Additionally, built-in monitoring capabilities based on Prometheus and Grafana allow us to continuously monitor how our clusters are utilized and the health of individual workloads.”
End-to-end security for sensitive data and applications
Rancher Prime also allows the IT team to centrally manage user permissions and access to the Kubernetes environment with role-based access controls (RBACs). These RBACs strictly separate individual projects from each other on the clusters – developers can only access the applications and resources they are authorized to access.
“Data security is of utmost importance for our containerized applications,” Kronseder emphasizes. “Rancher Prime provides us with powerful features to protect our environment from unauthorized access. On top of that, we use the solution to ensure consistent security settings across all clusters.”
Driving innovation and growth
According to Kronseder, SUSE technologies help MTU Aero Engines get closer to reaching zero-emission aviation every day: “Developments such as the geared turbofan would have been inconceivable without the reliable performance of our high-performance cluster based on SLES. And Rancher Prime is now paving the way for modern and agile application architectures.”
The experience of the first few months shows that Rancher Prime has been very well received internally. Various teams have started development projects on the container infrastructure and the first applications are already running on Kubernetes clusters. These include critical applications for warehouse management and maintenance. The operations team expects the number of containerized applications to grow rapidly in the near future.
“We will then benefit from the flexible scalability of our infrastructure,” says Opel. “With Rancher Prime, we can quickly provision the clusters and resources our teams need without adding complexity to managing the environment.”
What’s next for MTU Aero Engines?
Going forward, the team plans to use SUSE NeuVector to implement a Zero Trust strategy for its Kubernetes infrastructure. The SUSE NeuVector container security platform performs continuous checks at all stages of the container lifecycle and monitors all container communications in real time. It also quarantines suspicious containers automatically, and its virtual patch feature closes potential security holes while stopping unauthorized behavior before it affects other systems.
In a Rancher Rodeo on-site workshop, the operations team gained a clear understanding of the solution’s capabilities. “SUSE NeuVector offers a range of technologies that will take our container security to the next level,” says Opel. “With it, we can protect our container infrastructure from unknown threats.”
Kronseder states: “In the future, we will certainly look at extending our Kubernetes environment to hybrid cloud scenarios. This was already a key factor in selecting Rancher Prime as our Kubernetes management platform. The platform’s ability to support all major Kubernetes offerings in the public cloud is especially valuable for us as it enables us to prepare for any future scenarios.”