In this article you will read about,

• why simulation specialist CADFEM meets its high IT performance needs with the Open Telekom Cloud,
• how the company deals with peak loads in the calculation of physical processes,
• and why the public cloud provides a significant cost optimization.

It’s 12 noon on the Hahnenkamm slope in Kitzbühel: With a perfect short turn, the highly focused ski racer glides over the firm alpine snow and elegantly skirts one slalom pole after another. What often looks amazingly effortless in sports broadcasts is in reality not only the result of years of training, but also of perfected material technology. After all, finding the optimal design in the development of professional ski models requires many prototypes and test runs. "With modern simulation software, for example, so-called reverse engineering is possible to precisely determine the material properties in the layer structure of a ski model," says Erke Wang, one of the three managing directors at CADFEM GmbH.

The company, headquartered in Grafing near Munich, not only makes such calculations possible, but has also been supporting customers from all industries for over 35 years in the simulation of complex physical relationships using the right software. CADFEM not only sells the programs for this, but also calculates complex virtual models of future products for its customers.

In order to carry out these types of very complex simulations in the desired time in a data-protection-compliant and secure manner, the simulation technology specialist has been using high-performance graphical flavors as flexibly scalable computing power from the Open Telekom Cloud since 2020. The decisive factor was the limitations imposed by the hardware that it had been operating itself: "The servers in our data center were difficult to scale. If individual employees needed more power for their projects, this always involved a certain amount of effort," says Thomas Ermann, Deputy Head of IT at CADFEM. The background: At the time, employees were assigned fixed IT resources, which meant that each employee had only limited computing capacity at their disposal. In practice, the fixed allocation also made it more difficult to manage capacities when personnel changed, as administrators had to constantly configure and assign rights for the hardware.

Since CADFEM started using the Open Telekom Cloud, these restrictions have become a thing of the past. The company now obtains its computing capacities via Elastic Cloud Server and can easily add additional resources to its basic configuration when demand peaks. This has also enabled the company to noticeably reduce its organizational effort: "If a demanding calculation does require additional performance, our employees flexibly select hardware with the corresponding resources from the cloud," says Thomas Ermann. The Open Telekom Cloud provides various performance classes for a wide range of application scenarios via Elastic Cloud Server, which are freely scalable. If the booked resources of a performance class are no longer sufficient, customers such as CADFEM can order additional high-performance servers via the cloud solution. The CPUs of these servers are then available to the customer alone during the booked period, so that the customer can use their capacity as efficiently as possible.

Thanks to the public cloud, CADFEM not only benefits from flexibly scalable resources, but has also significantly improved the cost-effectiveness of its IT operations: "In the past, we leased all of our hardware and thus always paid for unused capacity as well," says Erke Wang. With the public cloud, on the other hand, the company now only pays for the capacity it needs. Another advantage is that CADFEM can now precisely allocate the variable costs to the respective projects and transparently pass them on to their customers.

With the new capacities, the specialist for simulation technology has not only laid the foundations for the future, but has also harmonized its IT landscape across locations: "Instead of local individual solutions, our partners in Austria and Switzerland now also use the computing power from the public cloud," says Thomas Ermann. And that’s not all: Soon, CADFEM wants to provide its customers with cloud computing resources for their own calculations in addition to software and simulation services.

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