Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato enhances performance and saves with Nutanix

The Mexican organization simplifies operations and improves availability with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure

The Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato operates in Guanajuato, Mexico. Each state in Mexico has its own Secretary of Education. Within the Secretary of Education, the Technological Infrastructure and Connectivity department is in charge of a specific number of schools managed with a state budget and a data center where they maintain all of the educational and administrative platforms used by teachers, students, and administrative personnel. The Technological Infrastructure of Connectivity department at Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato controls its access to the school control systems, educational platforms, administrative platforms, and payroll.

Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato has had a data center for approximately 15-17 years. They were fortunate enough to build it from scratch and examine the various phases of their data center’s growth. They currently manage around 70,000 e-mail accounts and users for different applications. Additionally, they have 7,000 administrative accounts and are currently reaching 1.5 million student email accounts. 

Since implementing Nutanix, The Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato has been impressed by the ease and speed of its launch and has benefitted from always-on availability, ongoing support, cost and time savings, and enhanced data protection. 

Key Results

Challenges

Federico Razo González, Director of Technological Infrastructure and Connectivity at Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato, shared that their first initial challenge was the excess of brand diversity for their servers. They had servers from one brand and storage from other brands. The issues that came from this were the complex interactions between the server clusters, the outdated storage, and the applications. The connection between the server and storage clusters was incredibly slow, with no connection by fiber. 

Their legacy servers started to get old, then they bought new technology, but that new technology had to be connected to old storage, creating a problematic cycle that wouldn’t progress. Federico and his team received many user complaints about slow applications. For example, access to the main page of the Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato was extremely slow. The site holds an incredible amount of information which is a primary factor in the lack of speed. 

The client wanted to virtualize their platforms, but virtualizing with servers and virtual machines inside external storage, was challenging. It was not an issue that they could take out the performance of both servers and storage, and the most significant impact overall was the slowness of the applications and databases.

Solution

When the Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato chose Nutanix, their initial reaction after implementing the new hyperconverged infrastructure solution was positive when they noticed how fast the system operated. Second, the ease of making backups was simple and reliable. Their computer equipment was already old and becoming obsolete. As they started using Nutanix to generate virtual machines in the platform, they could give a new life to their old machines, even if it was just to connect them.

Another Nutanix solution came about from an issue of not updating the servers. One day when the IT team arrived, two out of the six nodes were down. Even though the two nodes were down, they had no problems because the other four supported the entire infrastructure. Federico and his team spoke with Nutanix, they talked to the vendor, and within 2 hours of having the failure and having reported it, Nutanix had already solved the issue. 

“We are very satisfied with the solution. That is very clear to me and my server and database colleagues. We no longer have the previous concern,” says Federico.

Customer Outcomes

Enhanced performance

“Previously, it took us at least two days to generate servers and upload them to our application. And right now, the people who manage the infrastructure generate the virtual machines in hours, and I could even say in minutes they can generate two, three, or four servers, and we put them online and solve the problems very quickly. That's made it easy for us to manage virtual servers. Incredible. That's what we have now with Nutanix,” explains Federico.

Optimal speed

“The advantage of Nutanix is having optimal speed—the speed of generating teams and the speed of the main page of Guanajuato's Education through SharePoint. SharePoint stores a ton of information, so the page load speed has always been problematic. The speed of SharePoint was something that would take overwhelming long minutes, but with Nutanix it loads within seconds,” details Federico. “The Social Communications team was very happy to witness the benefits of Nutanix. They could see the response rate was faster than they’d ever experienced before. Even the teachers started utilizing SharePoint as an information page because they did not want to enter the slow site. Look, you have a problem because you haven't upgraded. If you were to upgrade, if you were on Nutanix, you would have no problem". 

Lower operating costs

Before selecting Nutanix, the Technological Infrastructure and Connectivity department at Secretaria de Educación Guanajuato knew that they had an old infrastructure that could no longer be maintained and that they had to make a change. “Well, simply for the fact that the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure controls everything, processing, memory and storage, it reduces costs. We also now use less air conditioning and less electricity,” details Federico.

Partners in technology

The other option would cost them around 15 million pesos when they looked at alternatives, while the Nutanix solution was about six million. “The other solution would cost more and not give me the performance that the Nutanix solution gives me. Nutanix has provided us freedom, so to speak, from the infrastructure and speed that we now have. Apart from all this, I will have five years of technical support. So it was the best investment I could’ve made,” shares Federico.

Next Steps

With the proven advantages of the Nutanix solutions, Federico states their plans to expand the technological infrastructure adding one to two units a year for the next five years. They started with four units and last year increased to six. 

“Well, look at the speed of our infrastructure consolidation. We have a specific space for it now and no longer have a major problem. That and, above all, the confidence that Nutanix gives us because I have the backing, guarantee, and ease of use. Nutanix's support and the integrator's support is the best thing we could have. We were very fortunate that we connected with Nutanix”, concludes Federico.

Learn more at www.nutanix.com