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The University of Waikato has halved its IT energy demands with a hybrid multicloud strategy centred on Nutanix’s cloud platform, implemented by partner ASI Solutions.
When the University’s previous on-premise VMware IT infrastructure was up for renewal, university associate director architecture and applications Glenn Penfold decided to take a new approach aimed at setting the university up for the future and reducing risk.
One of the risks identified was the impending Broadcom acquisition of VMware.
“Our refresh project started in November 2023, so although we didn’t know exactly what the acquisition would mean for us, the writing was on the wall,” Penfold said.
“It was enough of a risk for us to make sure we considered alternatives.”
The approach would also further improve University of Waikato’s sustainability credentials.
Ongoing capital investment and maintenance costs for running the data centre were prohibitive and caused the uni to focus on the wrong areas, Penfold said. The was distracting the team from adding “digital value”.
“Traditionally, we had run and hosted our own data centre,” he said. “Through the refresh process we identified data centres had become commoditised and that we would be better off letting a professional organisation run ours.”
The university has 13,500 students and 2,500 staff across campuses in Hamilton and Tauranga as well as a joint institute in Hangzhou, China.
Its relationship with local partner ASI Solutions was key to the project’s success, Penfold said.
“ASI has a good niche at finding these strategic technologies that are a perfect fit. They have a large education customer base, so they truly understood our business and the challenges we face.”
After a competitive tender, the University selected Nutanix Cloud Platform and the Nutanix AHV hypervisor to complement its desired hybrid multicloud strategy, energy efficiency targets and flexibility and scalability requirements.
“Through the implementation, we’ve consolidated our infrastructure needs from 14 physical racks to just seven, requiring much less power without sacrificing performance,” Penfold said.
The university would always have a requirement for some on-premise infrastructure given data sovereignty requirements around research and applications such as student management being unable to operate in the cloud, he said.
“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,” he said.
Public cloud and SaaS were, however, preferred where they made sense.
Nutanix enabled application mobility across these different environments while providing a “single pane of glass” to manage and maintain the various clouds.
The implementation was completed on an “aggressive” timeline and during a period of peak demand.
“We made our decision in November 2023, had the platform up-and-running before Christmas, and finished migrating workloads by March,” Penfold said.
“Our first semester starts in late February; it’s our busiest time of year, and we were able to complete the whole migration of production workloads during this time with zero disruption.”
During the project, the University also sold its data centre to Spark. Its primary Nutanix cluster is now housed there with a disaster recovery cluster in Spark’s Takanini datacentre in Auckland.
The University is now in the initial stages of a virtual desktop infrastructure project in which it plans to decommission up to 1200 high-powered lab computers and provide students with remote access to high-power GPUs to run high-intensity engineering applications from anywhere.
It is also exploring the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution for future machine learning projects.
In August 2023, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan indicated a commitment to “immediately” invest an additional US$2 billion a year to “better unlock customer value” once the company’s proposed US$61 billion VMware acquisition was finalised.
“The proposed combination of Broadcom and VMware is pro-competitive and will deliver great value,” Tan said.
“It will advance the vision of workloads running in a multicloud environment. Our combined customers and partners will have access to a stable, growing and powerful multicloud platform.”
Aaron White, Nutanix general manager and vice president of APJ sales, said the rollout put the University of Waikato ahead of the curve and set it up for a “brighter, greener and smarter future”.
“Our recent enterprise cloud index report found hybrid multicloud cloud strategies would see the highest growth over the next three years – more than doubling from 15 per cent to 35 per cent of deployments – but many organisations are only in the early stages of this journey,” he said.