For years, Dartmouth College stitched together storage, compute and networking from different vendors, and the work had become a craft of specialists: The storage expert, the Unified Computing System (UCS) expert, the VMware guru.
And it worked—until it didn’t. Contracts and hardware lifecycles converged, and Ty Peavey, the Director of Infrastructure Services at Dartmouth, realized the moment had come to either reapply fresh paint or rebuild the house.
That convergence also created a rare opportunity to solve some long-standing issues. This included too many vendors, manual processes and highly specialized roles that didn’t scale for Dartmouth’s small, lean team.
“We needed a unified ecosystem that would simplify infrastructure operations,” said Peavey, describing the desire for a hyperconverged platform that could eliminate siloes and automate time-consuming management and administrative tasks.
Scale
A 25-node Nutanix cluster now supports 1,000 VMs and 1,000 containers.
Efficiency
A team of 10 now manages an infrastructure that used to require twice as many people.
Speed
VM provisioning was reduced from two days to 20 minutes.
Flexibility
Departments across campus now consume a shared platform instead of running isolated hardware.
We flipped how we used to operate by rebuilding every layer of the stack to meet the needs of a modern campus. And Nutanix was instrumental in making the transition simple and non-disruptive.
The choice was not spontaneous. It was a slow unpeeling of assumptions. Peavey’s team ran proof-of-concept tests, sat through vendor demos, and debated late into the evening about risk and reward. Dartmouth had been a VMware shop for over a decade—comfortable, confident and cautious.
Yet the promise of one platform that could simplify infrastructure operations and enable a small team to do the work of a much larger one, began to look less like a gamble and more like a necessity.
When the infrastructure team finally voted, “it was unanimous,” according to Peavey. Dartmouth would go all in on the Nutanix platform and a new way of working where they could run apps and data anywhere.
Peavey’s transformation goal was cultural as much as technical: Replace siloes with generalist engineers and replace manual toil with automation. He describes the old model in human terms.
“I literally had a person who did nothing but storage,” he recalled. “I also had one person focused solely on UCS and another who did VMware. That model was expensive and fragile for a campus the size of Dartmouth.”
The new playbook emphasized speed, consistency and self-service while automation became the team’s operating rhythm.
“Now we can build a VM in about 20 minutes,” said Peavey. “It used to take a couple of days. Ansible, Terraform, Nutanix APIs, and integrated tooling turned multiday projects into minutes.”
Dartmouth had been an early adopter of containers. What began as open-source Kubernetes on physical servers evolved into a mature, integrated container platform.
“In the first few years we had about 400 different containers,” Peavey recalled. “But that scale brought complexity. We needed vendor-vetted upgrades, simpler networking and one-click operations, which led us to Kubernetes.”
After piloting NKP, Dartmouth found the integration elegant and manageable—enough to fold containers into the same operational model as VMs.
Numbers tell part of the story: A 25-node cluster, about 1,000 VMs, and as many containers. A team of 10 doing work that used to require far more people. A campus that can choose where to run an application—on-premises, in AWS or as SaaS—based on fit rather than dogma.
But the real impact is quieter. A graduate student in a lab can now iterate on an analysis overnight instead of waiting weeks. A small department can collapse its aging hardware into a shared platform and redirect budget toward research. The infrastructure became an enabler of curiosity, not a bottleneck.
Peavey said it’s about “making VMs cattle, not pets.” The phrase is blunt, but it captures a cultural shift: Systems are disposable and reproducible. That mindset freed the team to focus on technical innovations that empower researchers and teaching instead of babysitting the infrastructure.
According to Peavey, technology alone didn’t win the day—the business relationship with Nutanix played a considerable role.
“Our conversations with most large vendors are very dry and transactional,” he said. “But Nutanix worked with us as partners, always considering what was best for us.”
“The human approach taken by Nutanix—engineers listening, product teams engaging and asking the right questions—turned an otherwise risky migration into a successful collaborative mission,” Peavey said, adding that “The attitude shift throughout our department was as meaningful as any technical metric.”
Dartmouth’s infrastructure journey became a catalyst for reinvention. What started as routine upkeep and software license renewals evolved into a bold, ground‑up redesign.
The college’s modern new infrastructure now enables faster provisioning, reproducible research environments, and a platform that scales without requiring more headcount.
“We flipped how we used to operate by rebuilding every layer of the stack to meet the needs of a modern campus,” said Peavey. “And Nutanix was instrumental in making the transition simple and non-disruptive.”
The end result is more than just a technical upgrade—it’s a lasting shift in how Dartmouth supports research, education and its long‑term institutional strategy. For Peavey, it stands as a defining milestone in his 15‑year career and a transformation that will shape the college for years to come.
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