Canterbury Christ Church University has migrated to Nutanix Hyperconverged Infrastructure, due to its greater performance with lower energy consumption, reduced costs and simplified management. Since the deployment, Christ Church University has been able to consolidate its IT infrastructure into just a single rack in each data centre.
Faced with a budget shortfall to refresh servers and storage, Canterbury Christ Church University was forced to get creative. Its campus typically has about 18,000 students and 1,800 staff, all of which have to be provided with access to applications and services within budget limits. The university’s IT systems were running a mix of workloads, including the finance system, the virtual learning environment and the student record system, plus unstructured file systems and the university’s web presence, meaning that IT systems are critical to the day to day running of the campus. When the time came for a refresh of the infrastructure, the IT team was not able to secure the entire budget required for new servers as well as storage, so other options had to be considered instead.
Christ Church University opted to go with XMA Ltd, who demonstrated to the University IT team that Nutanix’s offering could deliver on all their requirements. Christ Church University has now been able to consolidate all its IT infrastructure into the clusters of Nutanix nodes, simplifying management as the IT team no longer has to manage separate server and storage systems.
It has consolidated fourteen entire racks worth of various kinds of blade chassis and storage arrays running in three different locations, into just twenty rack units of space, ten in each data centre. The university now has two half racks, one in each data centre, so even the power consumption is much reduced. But it’s not just about the power for the compute, it takes less air con, it uses less storage, so simply uses fewer resources. This not only saves on space and simplifies management, but has other savings in terms of energy consumption.
Looking to the future, Andy Powell, Chief Technology Officer at Canterbury Christ Church University highlights how the university is aiming to extend consolidation and implement a hybrid cloud strategy enabled by the Nutanix infrastructure. “Moving forward, we’re continuing to consolidate our data centres and Nutanix really allows us to do that. With this consolidation, we expect to see a reduction in our carbon footprint, reduced electricity bills and minimal upkeep on the data centre. That’s what Nutanix is allowing us to do.”