When the University’s previous on-premise IT infrastructure was up for renewal, University of Waikato associate director of architecture and applications Glenn Penfold decided to take a completely new approach—one that would set it up for the future, derisk the organisation from vendor changes, and further improve its sustainability credentials.

Penfold recalls, “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.”

“For us, the ongoing capital investment and maintenance in running a data centre was prohibitive. This also caused us to focus on the wrong areas, and it was taking us away from adding digital value.”

Penfold said one of the risks identified was the impending acquisition of VMware, which was the University’s incumbent infrastructure vendor.

“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.”

After a tender process, the University selected Nutanix Cloud Platform and the AHX 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.

“Nutanix hit the mark for us as it was simple and easy to use, ticked all the boxes on our hybrid multicloud strategy, and from a sustainability point-of-view it was quite attractive,” he said.

“Through the implementation, we’ve consolidated our infrastructure needs from 14 physical racks to just seven, requiring much less power without sacrificing performance.”

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 hybrid multicloud. 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.”

Penfold 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.”

Penfold said the University’s relationship with local partner ASI Solutions was key to the project’s success.

“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.”

During the project, the University sold its data centre to Spark NZ. Its primary Nutanix cluster is now housed there with a disaster recovery cluster in Spark’s Takanini data centre in Auckland.

The University is now in the initial stages of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure project where it plans to decommission up to 1200 high-powered lab computers.

It is also exploring the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution for future machine learning projects.

Nutanix APJ sales general manager and vice president Aaron White said the University had future-proofed its business with a true hybrid multicloud strategy.

“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% to 35% of deployments – but many organisations are only in the early stages of this journey,” White said.

“This puts the University of Waikato well ahead of the curve and sets themselves up for an even brighter, greener, and smarter future.”

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 the North Island: in Hamilton and a downtown Tauranga, as well as a joint institute in Hangzhou, China.