Press Releases

USC Marshall School of Business Puts Students and Faculty First Using Nutanix Software

Leading Business School Reduces Complexity and Contributes to University’s Environmental Goals by Running All Critical Applications on Nutanix

SAN JOSE, Calif. – April 3, 2019 – Nutanix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today that University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business has deployed Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to run all of the school’s mission-critical workloads. Since deployment, the school has seen improved performance, decreased datacenter complexity and space required, and increased responsiveness and strategic support for faculty and student needs.

Currently, IT teams at many educational institutions are feeling increasing pressure to build a cloud-like IT infrastructure that supports the latest educational-technology advancements without the cost unpredictability of public cloud services. Faculty research now uses sizable amounts of data and analytics, and students need to access digital classroom resources from any device. Each faculty and student need triggers technology requests, which IT must respond to quickly and effectively. Business schools, in particular, are tasked with the challenge of properly equipping their students with the technology training needed to emerge as effective leaders after graduation.

Facing similar growth, performance and agility demands, The University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business sought to modernize their datacenter to more efficiently provide compute resources and applications to all of its staff, faculty, and students. Beforehand, management of their blade servers and storage environment was very time consuming and required coordination across multiple teams, so IT was not able to get applications up and running as quickly as their end users required.

The team set out to remedy these problems with a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that would accommodate the school’s requirements. The IT organization hoped to find an ideal solution that would abstract and manage the entire datacenter, allowing the team to focus on the school’s applications. Ultimately, USC Marshall chose Nutanix as it was the only solution that met all of the school’s criteria: it met their needs without sacrificing performance and could survive node failures, block failures and network failures.

USC Marshall began to see immediate results in their operational simplicity and ability to scale after deploying the Nutanix Core solution. The team underwent the deployment in only a couple of weeks and the installation was simple and required no additional training. The school is now running all of its student and faculty research applications—Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Java, web apps, domain controllers, and DNS—on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. The Nutanix solution has cut the team’s energy consumption by 50 percent, which helped them align with the university’s priority to help the planet with green initiatives.

One of the most important benefits of the solution is the school’s ability to better support faculty and students. The team can now fulfill faculty requests in 20 percent the amount of time it used to take. In addition, as a result of switching to Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution, adapting the datacenter to increased usage overtime is incredibly simple. Furthermore, the team now has the time to sit down with faculty to understand their strategic needs, and determines the best course of action based on each specific conversation. In one circumstance, based on a faculty member’s requirement for a quick response, the team turned around an environment for him in a couple of days and can now add capacity for him whenever it’s needed.

Finally, given the scaling simplicity and speed of deployment, the IT team is now also running all of its virtual desktops (VDI) on Nutanix and can give every single USC Marshall student his/her own simply and efficiently, adding additional desktops as needed. This additional VDI access provides students with access to some of the technology and software they’ll need to use in their professional lives following graduation from USC Marshall and further prepares them in their endeavors to be leaders in the business world.

“I’ve been at USC 20 years, and the biggest shift I’ve seen in that time is the increased expectation of IT resources from our end users,” said Dan Lewis, associate director of operations and infrastructure services at the USC Marshall School of Business. “The ease of scaling our Nutanix solution to accommodate end-user requests allows us to seamlessly meet demand to support the school’s research and student projects, helping the school reach an even higher level of academic excellence. It’s really easy to be an IT hero with Nutanix.”

“Increasingly, IT teams in universities and higher education are expected to deliver ad-hoc requests in a timely and effective manner,” said John Pellettiere, National Sales Director, SLED, Nutanix. “In order to properly serve educators’ and students’ needs, university IT teams need to embrace the latest datacenter and cloud technologies to streamline their operations and focus on what really matters. In the same vein, Nutanix is thrilled that our technologies have supported USC Marshall in its mission of preeminent innovation in business education.”

Additional Resources

For more information about USC Marshall, read the case study here.

About Nutanix

Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making infrastructure invisible so that IT can focus on the applications and services that power their business. Companies around the world use Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to bring one-click application management and mobility across public, private and distributed edge clouds so they can run any application at any scale with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. The result is organizations that can rapidly deliver a high-performance IT environment on demand, giving application owners a true cloud-like experience. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.

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