INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Marist College Canberra unlocks IT autonomy with Nutanix
Nutanix , a leader in hybrid multicloud computing , has helped Marist College Canberra simplify its IT infrastructure and enhance the learning experience for students and educators .
Established in 1968 , Marist College Canberra is a Catholic school for boys from Years 4 to 12 . The school ’ s 200 teachers and staff provide a diversity of academic , spiritual , cultural and personal development opportunities to its 1,800 students .
Sam Walton , ICT Systems and Operations Manager , and his five-strong team are responsible for providing the IT infrastructure and rolling out new projects that keep students connected and continue to improve their learning experience .
“ From an IT perspective , schools are always a complex environment ,” Walton said . “ Not only are we a relatively large school with more than 2000 end-users including students and teachers , but we also offer many extracurricular activities . The role of IT is to support all the different departments and all the applications they want to run in a single environment .”
Walton said maintaining such a complex environment with a legacy three-tier data center architecture including servers , storage and networking – a system created decades ago – would be a resourceintensive challenge . A recent investment in Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure , however , freed Walton and his team to deliver greater value to the school .
“ Nutanix is the heart of our digital learning experience ,” he said . “ We went from a full rack of SANs ( storage area networks ) and hosts which were much more complicated and required a lot more maintenance just to keep running , to Nutanix which is essentially ‘ set up and forget ’.
“ In our IT team , we have to know so much about everything , so the really good thing about Nutanix is that it just works – I can ’ t be dedicating resources to maintaining the environment every week . The infrastructure we have now means my team can focus on more strategic projects for the college .”
Another benefit , according to Walton , has been the reduced hardware footprint which has in turn reduced the college ’ s energy consumption .
“ IT infrastructure , particularly outdated infrastructure , can be a major energy burden ,” he said . “ Instead of a full rack , we ’ ve gone down to six RU ( rack units ) in our production environment . This has reduced power consumption to the point we ’ re now downsizing our UPS ( uninterruptible power supply ), which provides emergency power if the main power source fails .”
Marist is also using three Nutanix nodes for its on-campus Disaster Recovery ( DR ) environment which keeps systems going in the event of an outage , and another three nodes for object storage , which enables greater data scalability for the school .
“ DR is now instant ,” Walton said . “ For example , late last year I had to move everything to the DR site and performance wasn ’ t impacted at all . No one noticed any difference . This has enabled me to sleep at night because I know now if something ever goes wrong , we can seamlessly switch over to DR ”
Walton also said he has worked closely with Nutanix partner , Qirx , which has been instrumental in guiding the college during its architecture transformation .
“ Qirx has been incredible . They ’ ve been a trusted partner , making sure the college gets the best outcome . They ’ re not about pushing products . They understand every school is different , has different challenges , and needs different solutions – and they really took the time to understand what would work best for us .”
Jim Steed , Managing Director – ANZ at Nutanix , said Marist College Canberra has ensured the best learning experience for its students , both today and into the future .
“ With its IT team liberated from having to keep the lights on , Walton and the Marist IT team can focus on the things that matter – like improving the student and educator experience – rather than putting out fires and constant maintenance . At Nutanix , we believe IT infrastructure should be invisible so organizations like Marist can focus on what they do best – educating the next generation of Australian leaders ,” Steed said p .
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