St. Francis Xavier College Simplifies IT Infrastructure With Nutanix

Leading Canberra High School Replaces Legacy Three-Tier Architecture for Enterprise Cloud Platform to Futureproof IT

SYDNEY--()--Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced St. Francis Xavier College in Canberra has overhauled its three-tier storage area network (SAN) infrastructure and replaced it with the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.

Based in Canberra, 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, helpdesk, 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 significantly, while backups now occur more than 60 per cent faster. The datacentre itself has been reduced from 17 rack units to two, a reduction of more than 85 per cent 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 entirely 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 at 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 discs, data stores and space issues, are now amalgamated into one simple data store.”

Geoff attended a one-day Nutanix Technology Bootcamp and consulted with local IT solutions provider Qirx, a trusted partner of Nutanix. Qirx 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 Virtual Machine (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 Asia-Pacific and Japan at 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 futureproof the school’s IT infrastructure and enable the school do even more with innovation.”

About Nutanix

Nutanix makes infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on the applications and services that power their business. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform leverages web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, virtualisation and storage into a resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The result is predictable performance, cloud-like infrastructure consumption, robust security, and seamless application mobility for a broad range of enterprise applications. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.

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Contacts

Nutanix
Luica Mak, +44 790 547 1332
luica.mak@nutanix.com
or
Watterson (for Nutanix)
Oisin O’Callaghan, +61 2 9929 7533 or +61 431 612 386
oisin.ocallaghan@watterson.com.au

Contacts

Nutanix
Luica Mak, +44 790 547 1332
luica.mak@nutanix.com
or
Watterson (for Nutanix)
Oisin O’Callaghan, +61 2 9929 7533 or +61 431 612 386
oisin.ocallaghan@watterson.com.au