The University of Waikato has halved its IT energy demands with a hybrid multicloud strategy centred on Nutanix Cloud Platform solution.
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 campuses in the North Island — in Hamilton and Tauranga — as well as a joint institute in Hangzhou, China.
When the university’s previous on-premise IT infrastructure was up for renewal, Glenn Penfold, associate director architecture and applications, decided to take a completely new approach – one that would set it up for the future and derisk the organisation from vendor changes.
“Traditionally, we had run and hosted our own data centre. Through the refresh process we identified data centres had become commoditised, and that we would be better off letting a professional organisation run ours,” said Penfold.
“For us, the ongoing capital investment and maintenance in running a data centre was prohibitive,” he added. “This also caused us to focus on the wrong areas, and it was taking us away from adding digital value.”
After going to market with a competitive tender process, the university selected Nutanix Cloud Platform and the Nutanix AHV hypervisor since Nutanix complemented the university’s desired hybrid multicloud strategy and energy efficiency targets. It also provided the flexibility and scalability required for the university’s future plans.
“Through the implementation, we’ve consolidated our infrastructure needs from 14 physical racks to just seven, requiring much less power without sacrificing performance,” said Penfold.
He said the implementation was completed on an “aggressive timeline” and completed 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.”
The University is now in the initial stages of a virtual desktop infrastructure project in which it plans to decommission up to 1,200 high-powered lab computers, enabling students remote access to high-power GPUs to run high-intensity engineering applications from anywhere.
