Wonder what IBM zEnterprise System and Berlin Have in Common? (The Somehow Different City Guide)

Have you ever been to Berlin? It is always worth a visit, but May is an especially beautiful month to tour all the marvelous buildings and historic sites. And this is my top 9 list of recommended places to see if you come to Berlin this May:

• Alexanderplatz reflects centuries of social, political, and architectural history, but its “landmark” is the highest building of Berlin, the 365 meter high TV tower.
• The Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) is Berlin’s largest and most important Protestant church as well as the gravesite of the Prussian kings.
• The Museumsinsel (Museum Island), an UNESCO World Cultural Heritage since 1999, is a unique ensemble of five museums, illustrating the evolution of modern museum design over the course of the 20th century, and its collections span six thousand years of human fine arts.
• Being the symbolic center of West Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedaechtniskirche (Memorial Church) has been destroyed by allied bombing during 2nd WW, and the west Tower has been kept as a ruin as anti- war memorial to peace and reconciliation.
• The impressive monumental Nazi-era Olympic Stadium was built for the 1936 Olympic Games and carries vivid memories of the iconic images of African-American sprinter Jesse Owens whose historic four-medal Olympic victory shook Hitler’s theory of the superiority of the Aryan race.
• Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz consists of three special components known as Daimler City, the Sony Center, and the Beisheim Center, which literally transformed the dormant wasteland where the Berlin Wall stood between east and west Berlin until 1989 into one of the most pulsing areas of Berlin.
• The Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate) is one of Berlin’s most important monuments with over two hundred years of history. A symbol of the formerly divided city, many visitors used to climb on its “observation platform” in order to get a glimpse of the world behind the Iron Curtain, on the other side of the “death-strip” which separated east from west Berlin, geographically and politically.
• Famous for its modern glass and steel dome, the Reichstag building, located in the Western part of the formerly divided Berlin, just beyond the Wall, became a venue for exhibitions and today houses the Parliament of the re-unified Federal Republic of Germany.
• And finally, most important this May ;-), you should visit SUSE at Hotel Berlin – Berlin at Luetzowplatz 17, which on May 21st – 25th hosts one of the most important events in EMEA focusing on IBM System z and the zEnterprise System: the IBM System z Technical University.

I am absolutely convinced IBM picked Berlin as the venue by purpose: Once divided between two completely diverse countries, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany, political systems that had nothing in common, today Berlin is the vibrant capital of a unified Germany. Isn’t that an ideal metaphor for the IBM zEnterprise System? Hardware architectures once divided into silos, different departments that had no reason to speak with each other, are unified into one system that could become the pulsing core of your data center!

SUSE Linux Enterprise, a highly reliable, scalable and secure server operating system platform, optimized for all IT infrastructures – physical, virtual and cloud – is supported on all components of the IBM zEnterprise System. Combining SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z with IBM zEnterprise 196 or 114 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with the IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension lets you run your mission-critical workloads in a perfect end-to-end Linux solution environment that is designed for interoperability and heterogeneous, mixed IT environments. By unifying entire sections of your data center, you increase utilization, and save both time and money.

If you still have time left over while visiting all the historic sites of Berlin, we would be more than happy to welcome you during IBM System z Technical University at our booth #15. We – including myself – are definitely looking forward to chat with you about how SUSE Linux Enterprise Server lets you consolidate distributed workloads onto System z servers or onto the IBM zEnterprise System ensemble to help minimize costs, reduce downtime, decrease data center complexity and increase business agility.