Nutanix, a leader in private cloud, hybrid and multicloud computing, announced today that the University of Derby has migrated to Nutanix to refresh its IT infrastructure. Struggling with a legacy IT portfolio based on three-tier architecture that was causing performance and manageability issues, the University has now harnessed a scalable and flexible alternative that lets it focus on transformative projects.

With an aging infrastructure with legacy storage and blade servers that were leading to performance degradation, troubleshooting challenges and support handoff issues, the University sought an IT approach that was more integrated and that could scale more easily. In addition to renewing the core infrastructure platform used by staff and students, a key requirement was to create a way for researchers to spin up their own VM workloads. Another was for a solution without the admin impact of a multi-vendor approach, that could bring everything under the management of one team.  

Richard Lock, Principal Infrastructure Engineer, at the University of Derby said: “We have a small IT team and we wanted to focus engineers on improving and aligning with business needs, not just managing infrastructure. We wanted to improve services and free up time by being more automated. Today, we have one core technology to host and monitor on-premises IT services.” He continued: “Feedback from the application infrastructure team has been very good. There’s been a significant improvement in performance for page loads for student records and we’ve got the number of pages taking over three seconds to load down to one per cent. That has a direct impact on the user experience.”

Six engineers now manage all core infrastructure servers, storage and identity systems with Nutanix Prism being used for day-to-day visibility across systems that have replaced legacy three-tier equipment. The Nutanix Calm application management framework is used for research workloads where virtualisation is provided via the AHV hypervisor. File shares have been consolidated on Nutanix Files. The data centres have two-way failover integrated in the event of an outage or other disaster so operations can continue. 

Since deployment, the University of Derby now enjoys a more streamlined, manageable and performant IT environment. Also, staff are no longer forced to operate on a break/fix basis. 

Dom Poloniecki, Vice President & General Manager, Sales, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa region at Nutanix said: “Thanks to its forward-thinking approach, the University of Derby now benefits from a lot more automation freeing up its small team of engineers to focus on business value and from a hybrid environment appropriate for its contemporary strategy using SaaS applications wherever possible and Microsoft Azure as a core cloud platform. This sets the university in good stead for the future as it provides researchers and academics with the ability to meet their own requirements in a way that is both flexible and future-proofed.”

Looking to the future, the University of Derby is in a good position as it progresses with its hybrid cloud approach. It plans more services in the public cloud, providing greater agility to deliver services for teaching, learning and research.

In delivering the solution, Nutanix worked closely with partner XMA.