Nutanix technology is very intuitive, and it meshes extremely well together, but the real difference is in the relationships. I can come to Nutanix anytime I’m facing a challenge and reach a resource who will work with me right away. That’s something you just don’t get with other vendors.
Fordham University is a higher education leader that moves at enterprise speed. With nearly than 17,000 students across eight undergraduate and graduate schools, it relies on a cloud-powered infrastructure to empower its students, faculty, and administrators.
“Fordham has footprints with major cloud providers, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as our on-premises Nutanix solution,” said Nicholas Fontanez, Director of Platform Services, Fordham University & Enterprise Technology Leader
Fordham’s IT team supports nearly all student academic programs, including proprietary applications and SaaS-based solutions.
“We have integrations with Blackboard LMS, Banner administrative software, and a variety of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems,” said Fontanez. “We also facilitate infrastructure for the student community including virtualized desktops and access to storage and file sharing. It’s a plethora of vendor technologies, with Nutanix at its core.”
Exploring Cost and Operations Savings
With so much riding on its infrastructure, Fordham University is constantly seeking better ways to boost cost savings and efficiency.
“The big issue that is plaguing the higher education community is costs,” said Fontanez. “We’re seen the price of license renewals rise up to five or even 10 times, with vendors bundling their offerings into packages that include tools we don’t need.”
Operational efficiency also has a huge impact on costs, and the IT team was looking for ways to streamline and automate the way it provisioned resources to its internal customers.
“When a stakeholder requested a new VM, we had complex queues and workflows with multiple parties involved in the process,” said Fontanez. “It sometimes took one or two weeks to get machines provisioned with basic functionality.”
Doubling Down on Success
Fordham University had been a Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) customer for years, so its operations and licensing challenges created a natural opportunity to build on its investment—and prepare for future challenges.
Working closely with its Nutanix representatives, the IT team chose Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) to simplify and automate application deployment, infrastructure management, and governance. The result is a consistent private cloud operating model that extends across the university.
NCM lets Fordham standardize on a unified solution that automates platform management, bringing together all the tools needed to build, operate, and govern on a single management pane. Instead of paying for multiple tools that require different skill sets, the IT team can take control of its environment utilizing a common, intuitive interface.
“Other solutions require you to understand a wide stack of technologies and tools to provision resources,” said Fontanez. “For example, automating with tools like Terraform requires a strong understanding of cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code concepts. Nutanix of course requires technical skill, but it’s faster and easier to start using with its GUI, and I am all for simplicity over complexity.”
Achieving Simpler, More Efficient Operations
Streamlining operations has long been top of mind for IT, and Fordham had previously utilized Morpheus to automate provisioning of resources for its stakeholders. However, when HPE purchased Morpheus, licensing costs escalated, and support declined.
“We had to pivot quickly, which drove a conversation around Nutanix blueprints,” said Fontanez. “Fortunately, because we already had a lot of our homework done with the Morpheus workflows, we were easily able to transition over to blueprints.”
Using Nutanix blueprints functionality in NCM, the IT team can simplify cumbersome tasks, to save time, deliver consistent results to stakeholders faster, and keep trouble tickets from piling up.
“Blueprints have been a major improvement for us, reducing server provisioning from as much as a week to less than a day,” said Fontanez. “Automation has streamlined tasks like IP allocation, DNS creation, and configuration while reducing manual effort and errors. We’re now looking to bring that same automation to server decommissioning. The account team has also been a great partner, consistently providing the resources and support we need.”
Revealing New Insights for Better Planning
Nutanix is also delivering big benefits in terms of visibility into infrastructure that is already up and running. With the NCM Intelligent Operations dashboard, the team can acquire the metrics it needs to better understand resource utilization, then discuss ways to optimize environments for stakeholders.
“In some cases, we might find that VMs are using only 5-10% of a resource such as RAM,” said Fontanez. “With insights from Nutanix, we can tailor VM configurations to better align with their peak performance requirements—and still have the flexibility to easily expand them as needed.”
Toward Improved Resiliency
With its extended Nutanix Cloud Platform solution in place, Fordham is already looking ahead to make its environment even more stable and dependable. The IT team is exploring how Nutanix Files could help bring together select data center sites that are operating independently.
“We are considering ways to have clustered file shares across sites, which will help us redesign application stacks,” said Fontanez. “For example, we want to get to the point where our Rose Hill site can failover to Lincoln Center and vice versa, so that interruptions from maintenance or zero-day vulnerabilities would not affect the Fordham community.”
Over the long term, Fontanez envisions consolidating all of Fordham’s environments into one unified mesh, with each area capable of functioning independently or as a group, for maximum availability.
Fontanez and his team are excited about the ongoing Nutanix relationship and are looking forward to exploring future partnership opportunities in technology, and beyond.
“Nutanix has provided strong support outside of the tech space,” said Fontanez. “They were huge sponsors of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) event that we hosted, and also sponsored a high-profile public sector event at our Lincoln Center campus. Nutanix is different from other vendors; they understand the positive impact they can have by actively participating in our community.”