University of Waikato taps hybrid multicloud to transform education

New Zealand university goes all-in on Nutanix to de-risk organization from vendor acquisition uncertainty and deliver real value for students and staff.

Overview

The University of Waikato has always dared to do things differently. It taps the power of hybrid multicloud to transform education and improve student learning outcomes. Today, the University has delivered value to its stakeholders by ensuring business continuity, future-proofing its IT investment, freeing up significant space previously taken up by legacy infrastructure and computer labs, and provided students with open access to graphics-intensive design programs.

Key Results

Challenge

One of New Zealand’s leading institutions for teaching and research, the University of Waikato has 13,500 students and 2,500 staff across two vibrant campuses in Hamilton and Tauranga, as well as a joint institute in Hangzhou, China. The University aims to boost the campus experience and improve student learning outcomes through a 3-year digital transformation roadmap and is currently in its year-two mark.

When the University’s previous on-premise IT infrastructure was up for renewal, Glenn Penfold, Associate Director Architecture and Applications at University of Waikato, decided to take a completely new approach – one that would set the University up for the future, de-risk the organization, and further improve its sustainability credentials. “We wanted to focus our resources on digital value, rather than the nuts and bolts of running datacenters and infrastructure,” said Penfold.

Solution

With the support of ASI Solutions, the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution was selected as the platform of choice. This natively includes the Nutanix AOS Storage software stack and AHV hypervisor. “Nutanix hit the mark for us as it was simple and easy to use, ticked all the boxes on our hybrid cloud strategy, and from a sustainability point-of-view it was quite attractive. It provided automations to monitoring and maintenance and gave us the option to scale and move workloads between clouds when needed,” said Penfold.

Over the course of the project, the University had sold its datacenter space to Spark NZ to manage. Their primary Nutanix cluster is now housed there with a disaster recovery cluster in Spark’s Takanini datacenter in Auckland.

The University also recently completed a successful proof of concept (POC) for a virtual desktop environment (VDI) provided by Dizzion Frame and running on NCP. The plan is to decommission 1200 high-powered lab computers for engineering undergraduates onto the Nutanix platform with graphics processing unit (GPU) nodes. “With a Nutanix VDI, we can drive our flexi-teaching strategy, and enable anytime anywhere learning,” said Penfold.

Customer Outcome

Hybrid multicloud strategy is non-negotiable

Enabling the University’s hybrid multicloud strategy was a non-negotiable for Penfold. He said the University would always have a requirement for some on-premise infrastructure, given data sovereignty requirements around its research data, but public cloud and SaaS were preferred where it made sense.

“We’re heavy Microsoft Azure users, particularly for custom development applications and data integration, while Moodle – our Learning Management System – is fully hosted by Catalyst IT,” Penfold said. “While we use cloud wherever it fits, we will always have a physical presence due to the sensitivity of some of our data and the incompatibility of some business-critical apps – like our student management system – to run on the cloud.”

“For us, that means our future is a hybrid multicloud future. With that in mind, Nutanix was a perfect fit as it enables application mobility across our environments where we need it, as well as providing a single pane of glass to manage and maintain our various clouds – whether public, private, or hosted.”

Futureproofing IT investment with AHV hypervisor.

The team’s original plan was to continue using the VMware ESXi hypervisor to support virtualized workloads. However, the strategy was reviewed after the acquisition of VMware was announced. “It was enough of a risk for us to make sure we had an exit strategy,” said Penfold. “We decided to go all-in with Nutanix, with Nutanix AHV as the hypervisor. Our team got up to speed with Nutanix quickly – only a few days of bootcamp and they were ready.”

Rapid onboarding to Nutanix with zero downtime

The team got the Nutanix Cloud Platform up and running in about a week’s time and took about three months to migrate critical applications and production workloads, such as the student management service, multiple databases, and numerous research systems, onto Nutanix. “The migration period overlapped with the start of the semester, one of our busiest times of the year, and we were able to complete the migration with zero disruptions for both students and staff,” said Penfold.

Meet environmental sustainability goals with 50% less hardware and lower power usage

With Nutanix, Penfold’s team helped the organization demonstrate its commitment to environmental sustainability. “We have halved the datacenter footprint and reduced power consumption. It’s an important responsibility for everyone and Nutanix is helping us on the path to go clean and green,” said Penfold.

Reduced management complexity frees IT to focus on delivering value to business

Along with lowering power consumption, the move to Nutanix has allowed IT administrators to refocus on delivering value to the business. The legacy infrastructure was one long headache of maintenance windows and patching cycles. That stress has now disappeared, thanks to automation in Nutanix. “The team has more time to engage with the University and have those crucial stakeholder conversations about how we can deliver better value and put architecture behind some of our key business objectives,” states Penfold.

Drive flexi-teaching and enable anytime anywhere learning

Following the success of the VDI POC, Waikato plans to roll out the digital desktops in the coming months. The solution will provide engineering undergraduates with fast, reliable 24/7 remote access to high-power GPUs to run high-intensity engineering applications, such as SOLIDWORKS, from anywhere. Thanks to the GPU nodes in the Nutanix environment, students will see rendering times for their computer-aided designs fall from 8 hours to 1 hour, helping them complete their projects faster.

“We had different labs running Windows and Linux-based workstations for different workloads. Once our plans are rolled out, we will no longer have this problem. We can free up space from 1,200 lab computers and the University can be free to reimagine the new space. Students will be able to bring their own device, and start using these applications anytime anywhere,” said Penfold.

Next Steps

Looking ahead, the University is keen to investigate the Nutanix Database Service product. It would simplify database administration while ensuring reliable performance, scalability, and security. It is also keen to explore the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution for future machine learning projects.

Learn more at www.nutanix.com

PARTNER

ASI Solutions is a leading solutions provider of technology across Australia and New Zealand. The company supported and played a key role in the digital transformation of the University of Waikato. Using ASI Solutions’ Nutanix expertise, the University increased digital value to stakeholders, including students and teachers.

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09/24