Ontario Universities’ Application Centre Chooses Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. announced that the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre (OUAC) has chosen the its Enterprise Cloud Platform for an improved ROI resulting in 27% lower estimated costs versus competitive solutions over a 5-year period, a reduced VM cloning time from 31 minutes on OUAC’s old systems to just six seconds, and four times less rack space in the organization’s data centers.

In order to choose an IT infrastructure provider, the team evaluated options from five providers to find a solution with sufficient capacity to accommodate 100% growth over the next two years, and to integrate with OUAC’s existing backup/recovery solution and 10 GbE network. Nutanix accomplishes each of these needs, and also provided OUAC with an additional estimated 5-year cost savings of 27% lower than any of the alternate solutions due to fewer server and energy expenses.

OUAC purchased two Enterprise Cloud Platform systems in 2016. One was installed at OUAC’s main data center, and the other at its remote DR site. The deployment took less than a half a day to install at each location, as opposed to OUAC’s previous solution of NetApp storage, HP servers and VMware virtualization, which had taken OUAC four to five days to deploy.

“We started our upgrade project as just a ‘storage replacement adventure’, but when we looked at what Nutanix offered, the Enterprise Cloud Platform made a lot of sense for our use case,” said Peter Schaefer, manager of systems infrastructure and facilities, OUAC. “We’re extremely happy with the Nutanix solution, and our relationships with both the support and sales teams have been stellar. We made an excellent decision when we decided to switch to Nutanix.“

Since moving to Nutanix to run its product server virtualization and DR, the OUAC IT team no longer has to manage separate servers, storage, and network components. As a result, the team is saving over 100 hours per year in IT management time. The team has also seen savings in data center space: they’ve gone from 34 rack units of HP servers and NetApp storage systems, down to just 8 rack units of Nutanix. Overall, entire system is also running much faster: when cloning a VM, the time to finish dropped from 31 minutes on the 5-year old NetApp systems to just 6 seconds on Nutanix. Finally, OUAC is also leveraging Nutanix built-in data protection, which has increased the speed of backup replication times on Nutanix and has eased restore initiatives.

“OUAC now joins a long list of renowned educational institutions and centers that rely on Nutanix Enterprise Clouds for faster performance, higher reliability and reduced management of their IT infrastructures,” said Robert Yelenich, country manager, Canada, Nutanix. “Due to its capacity to adapt and scale based on budgets and team size, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform is an ideal choice for many of our customers in the education sector.“

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