Underpins IT Strategy to Deliver Business Value and New Services 

Nutanix, a leader in private cloud, hybrid, and multicloud computing, today announced that its software has helped the Royal Opera House (ROH) in London to take full advantage of cloud technologies and realise benefits across its business.

With a history spanning more than 250 years, the ROH is the UK’s only permanent house for opera and ballet, staging 420 live performances every year. Following a £50m makeover and building upgrade at its headquarters in London’s Covent Garden, the ROH wanted to modernise its IT infrastructure. Whilst its relatively modern systems were functional, the lack of flexibility in the stack meant that it was ‘ticking over’, rather than delivering added value to the business.

With a large number of performances and plans to expand its digital streaming offering – the fastest growing part of the business – it evaluated all available options, the ROH chose the Nutanix Prism Pro multi-cloud management console and Nutanix Calm, along with Rubrik backup and recovery-as-a-Service.

Delivered by Nutanix partner ET Works, the solution was cost-effective, with a lower total cost of ownership than other options, including using entirely public cloud; however, it was also flexible and easy to manage. In addition to being less expensive from the start, Nutanix also provided transparency on upgrade costs for new workloads and future expansion, which offered cost certainty for the ROH.

Daniel Rubie, Head of Technology Operations, Royal Opera House, said: “I was looking for a solution that was cost effective, easy to manage and flexible. We needed something that meant I didn’t have to expand the technical team, that would take care of security and would tie into our cloud strategy. We wanted something affordable to tie together our workloads and applications across multiple premises and clouds and provide a clear technology direction and certainty on future expansion.”

Dom Poloniecki, Vice President & General Manager, Sales at Nutanix, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa said: “In addition to delivering efficiencies for the ROH, operating a hybrid cloud with Nutanix provides the additional benefit of a fully integrated system so, when it comes to upgrades, downtime is no longer needed; it is simply a case of moving workloads to a different node with no loss of service. An added benefit is that the team also no longer has to monitor capacity and juggle backups or monitor for errors, which frees them up to focus on higher value projects.”

The ROH is now looking at how it can use technologies such as Chef, Ansible and Docker within its IT infrastructure. The Nutanix and Rubrik platform is an API-first architecture and Nutanix Karbon allows for native deployment of Docker applications.

A key growth area for the ROH is high definition video and sound digital streaming to cinemas. The company’s broadcast and media teams are also exploring Nutanix-enabled on-prem storage options, which will later be archived to the cloud.