UK Royal Opera House Chooses Nutanix Cloud Platform Software

Nutanix, Inc. announced that its software has helped the Royal Opera House (ROH) in London, UK, to take advantage of cloud technologies and realize benefits across its business.

With a history spanning more than 250 years, the ROH is the UK’s only permanent house for opera and ballet, staging 420 live performances every year. Following a £50 million makeover and building upgrade at its HQs in London’s Covent Garden, the ROH wanted to modernize its IT infrastructure. While its relatively modern systems were functional, the lack of flexibility was hindering innovation, rather than delivering added value to the business.

With a large number of performances and plans to expand its digital streaming offering – the fastest growing part of the business – the ROH evaluated all available options, ultimately choosing the Nutanix Cloud Platform including Nutanix Prism Pro and Nutanix Calm to deliver intelligent ITOPs and automation across a multicloud environment, along with Rubrik backup and recovery-as-a-service.

Delivered by Nutanix partner Eurotech Computer Services Ltd (ET Works), the solution was cost-effective, with a lower TCO than other options; however, it was also flexible and easy to manage. In addition to being less expensive from the start, Nutanix also provided transparency on upgrade costs for new workloads and future expansion, which offered cost certainty for the ROH.

“I was looking for a solution that was cost effective, simple to manage and flexible. We needed something that meant I didn’t have to expand the technical team, that would take care of security and would tie into our cloud strategy,” said Daniel Rubie, head of technology operations, Royal Opera House. “We wanted something affordable to tie together our workloads and applications across multiple premises and clouds and provide a clear technology direction and certainty on future expansion.“

“In addition to delivering efficiencies for the ROH, operating a hybrid multicloud environment with Nutanix provides the additional benefit of a fully integrated system so, when it comes to upgrades, downtime is no longer needed. It is simply a case of moving workloads to a different node with no loss of service,” said Dom Poloniecki, VP & GM, sales, Nutanix, Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. “An added benefit is that the team also no longer has to monitor capacity and juggle backups or monitor for errors, which frees them up to focus on higher value projects.“

The ROH is looking at how it can use technologies such as Chef, Ansible and Docker within its IT infrastructure. The Nutanix and Rubrik platforms provide an API-first architecture and Karbon, Nutanix’s integrated Kubernetes management solution, allows for native deployment of containerized applications.

A key growth area for the ROH is HD video and sound digital streaming to cinemas. The company’s broadcast and media teams are also exploring Nutanix-enabled on-premises storage solutions, which will later be archived to the cloud.