The University of Northampton has migrated to Nutanix, replacing a complex multivendor legacy solution with a smart, flexible architecture that allows services to be quickly spun up and down in order to serve core computing needs. IT administrative staff now have simplified control over key elements across its two on-premises datacentres and SaaS applications and a new, unified model for managing core IT operations that would support resilience and high availability.
The University of Northampton has about 15,000 students and 2,500 staff and plays a full part in the highly competitive UK higher education sector. However, as with so many education institutions, it was struggling to manage compute resources and deal with complex IT demands and the importance of data to core operations. Prior to Nutanix, the University had Microsoft Hyper V and VMware ESXi virtualisation hypervisors with a Cisco HyperFlex and vSAN environment.
“There was some feeling in the IT department in favour of a familiar three-tier architecture. But, before Northampton I had worked at a private-sector Nutanix customer that had successfully moved from a three-tier architecture to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) without looking back,” explains Jack Harrison, Technical Solutions Architect, University of Northampton. “A review of what our peers were accomplishing and expert external advice made it clear we had to adopt HCI.”
Northampton is delighted with the outcome of its migration, feeling that it now has a modern control plane and strong resilience, failover and backup capabilities. It can now get data back up within 15 minutes in the event of an outage, which is key for the University as before it was looking at a 24-hour wait to get back to the best original state; that would be catastrophic at a time like clearing, when there is a rush to accept students for the new academic year.
Northampton remains a combination of on-premises and SaaS but Nutanix is the glue that connects both and will be the foundation for any future change. The University is also now considering how best to get more from the Nutanix ecosystem. Harrison says using Nutanix Frame for accessing Windows and web apps from a browser is “a big consideration for secure dial-in” as are Nutanix Database Service for simplifying database deployments across platforms.
