Universitas Management Chooses Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced that Quebec based non-profit Universitas Management, Inc., one of Canada’s registered education savings plan (RESP) specialists is upgrading its entire server structure to Nutanix’s virtual computing platform.

Universitas cited simplicity, speed to implement, savings from reduced rack space footprint and improved use of IT staff resources as important factors that contributed to their decision to deploy Nutanix’s platform.

As a not-for-profit organization with limited resources and an ongoing requirement to reduce costs and drive efficiencies, Universitas chose Nutanix’s OS, which combines compute and storage into a single distributed system, as the platform to bring greater efficiencies and scalability to its environment. The Virtual Computing Platform will allow Universitas to scale up as their needs and services continue to expand over time.

According to Pierre Girard, Universitas’ director of IT security and infrastructure, the decision to partner with Nutanix followed a several month infrastructure assessment undertaken by its IT department and led by Girard.

“Being a not-for-profit organization, we were facing the challenge of managing exponentially increasing amounts of data and higher demands in database performance than our traditional SAN-based virtualization solution could deliver,” said Girard. “Simultaneously, we had the challenge of overseeing the high overhead associated with managing increasing complexity without being able to add to our headcount.“

As Universitas continued its search for the right solution, one of its senior systems administrators presented Nutanix products for consideration.

“It responded to all of our challenges and offered the benefit of dramatically reducing costs associated with renting rack space,” said Girard. “It also helped optimize our investment by increasing the scalability of our private cloud and decreasing the workload needed to provision more resources to our systems.“

Girard estimates that Universitas’s migration to Nutanix will save well over 225 hours of valuable systems administrator time to work on tasks he considers far more important than VM deployment.

“We are helping to dramatically change the dynamics of Universitas’s entire datacenter,” said Anton Granic, senior director, Nutanix Canada. “Our virtual computing platform quickly proved to be their perfect solution – providing the organization with an easy to manage, fully redundant, cost-effective offering.“

Universitas is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The organization is also Nutanix’s first customer in Quebec. Assisting with the technical installation of Nutanix for Universitas was the Quebec-based firm, Micro Logic.