St. Francis Xavier College in Australia Simplified IT Infrastructure With Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced St. Francis Xavier College in Canberra, Australia, has overhauled its three-tier SAN infrastructure and replaced it with its Enterprise Cloud Platform.

St. Francis Xavier College is a co-educational school for years 7 through 12. The college has approximately 1,200 students and 150 staff. These students and staff rely on many applications and services running across 40 virtual servers, including ClickView video library, a student information system, help-desk, web and print services, Microsoft Exchange 2016, Casper for iOS, and more.

The IT infrastructure upgrade has led to many improvements within the college, including an increase in performance reported by students and staff. Windows Server performance has improved, while backups occur more than 60% faster. The data centre itself has been reduced from 17 rack units to 2, a reduction of more than 85% of physical space, not to mention the reduction in time and effort needed for server maintenance and energy consumption.

Previously, the college’s legacy system was slow compared with modern solutions, and faced challenges with storage – it could take several hours to get everything back online following an outage. The school ultimately decided to consider something different as it was approaching the end of its five-year refresh cycle.

“I’m getting close to retirement and wanted to leave behind a simpler, more modern solution for the person that takes over,” said Geoff Smith, network manager, St. Francis Xavier College. “My time has been freed up to focus more on delivering technology and useful applications that add value to the school staff and students, rather than babysitting the data centre. That’s the main value for me with Nutanix – time and the fact that it’s basically made our infrastructure invisible requiring minimal effort to run.“

“We looked at a number of solutions, including SimpliVity. In our opinion, Nutanix offered the best value for money, performance and simplicity, as well as the easiest deployment and management, and the best verified support. It runs like a dream – all the old servers which had a variety of disks, data stores and space issues, are now amalgamated into one simple data store.“

Smith attended a one-day Nutanix Technology Boot-camp and consulted with local IT solutions provider Qirx Pty Ltd, a partner of Nutanix, that recommended the Nutanix platform and built out the solution for the school. The full migration began in early January and was completed on a part-time schedule in around two weeks; just in time for the new school year and with no disruption on the IT department’s daily workload.

The deployment currently consists of the NX-1000 series with options to expand the environment as the school’s requirements scale up. Software consists of the Nutanix Installer, Controller VM (CVM), and consumer-grade management, Prism, with one-click simplicity.

“Technology is vital in how education is administered today,” said Matt Young, SVP and head of AsiaPac and Japan, Nutanix. “St. Francis Xavier College is technology-driven, leveraging many IT applications and services to innovate how students learn and educators teach. Having this digital environment in place will help future proof the school’s IT infrastructure and enable the school do even more with innovation.“