The Background
Warwickshire College Group (WCG) is a further and higher education provider with five college facilities across five sites. Offering over 400 courses across 41 different subject areas from agriculture to brickwork and music production to motor vehicle repair, the group offers educational experiences that are designed to boost employability.
The 30-strong IT team is run as a ‘business within a business’ and supports approximately 11,500 users including 10,000 students and 1,500 staff.
The Challenge
“We were a VMware early adopter, but had been tracking Nutanix for some time,” said Matt Tennant, Corporate Services Director – Digital & IT, Warwickshire College Group. “We were looking at how we could modernize and improve our technology, in particular because a lot of the servers were coming up to end of life. We were also tracking the impact of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, which was going to increase our IT costs significantly.”
“We knew we wanted to upgrade, but as an educational institution, timing was key: we couldn’t have too much downtime because it would disrupt the educational experience and the back-office systems that support it,” Matt continued. “The challenge was that although we could replace individual parts relatively easily, we didn’t want to push the resilience of the overall system. It was time for a change.”
The Solution
Initially, the focus was on hyperscaler native services, partly due to an award the College had previously won, which included credits with one of the hyperscalers. WCG and PrimeSys continued to explore different options but found it increasingly difficult to obtain timely and consistent answers on both the technical and cost aspects of the service from their hyperscale cloud provider. Consequently, PrimeSys recommended looking at Nutanix on OVHcloud.
“We take our duty to our customers very seriously,” said Ian Curry, Director at PrimeSys. “But the early stages of the project were challenging and a little frustrating. There were delays in technical responses and the pricing from the hyperscaler was complicated and opaque. We like to work in an open and transparent way with our customers, ensuring they have a clear view of costs but this was proving difficult and Matt was concerned that he would be writing a blank cheque each month. In contrast, OVHcloud’s simple cost model with no hidden fees enabled us to give Matt the clarity he needed for accurate budgeting.”
The OVHcloud and PrimeSys teams set up a chat channel for testing and issues resolution, as well as liaising with JANET to avoid any bottlenecks when peering with the high-speed academic network. Although PrimeSys and OVHcloud are on the G-Cloud 14 framework, the solution was procured from PrimeSys via the NHS SBS framework— a centrally managed route used across the NHS and wider public sector to simplify compliant technology purchasing.
“Technical information that had taken months previously was provided almost immediately and OVHcloud set up a trial environment to help us validate aspects of the design in a matter of weeks,” Ian continued.
WCG and PrimeSys chose Nutanix on OVHcloud, running HGR HCI i3 servers in OVHcloud’s UK datacentre, using a dual Intel Xeon configuration with 1.5TB RAM and 12x 3.84 TB SSD storage drives, as well as an IP load balancer for traffic across the three cloud nodes. This was a substantial consolidation from the ten virtual server hosts that the WCG team was previously running, greatly simplifying operations and saving on management time.
“The initial migration and creation of our ‘cloud campus’ was relatively easy to handle over the summer holidays,” Matt continued. “Nutanix is well set up for migrations from VMware, and the lack of ingress and egress fees on OVHcloud meant that if we messed it all up, it wouldn’t cost us anything to get our data out again – whereas with hyperscale solutions, reversibility was always going to be an issue. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that and the initial stage of the migration went smoothly.”
However, despite early success, there were teething problems. All of the college sites were connected via a single IP interface, and when the students came back after the holidays, the massive increase in connection numbers was incorrectly identified as a DDoS attack and access to systems was blocked. Thankfully, Matt was able to quickly escalate the issue and resolve it with the OVHcloud team, also ensuring that in future, the sites would connect via separate virtual IPs to avoid the problem happening again.
“We did have a few stressful days,” Matt admitted. “But when we had issues, solving them was a real team effort. Every time I speak to the different sites, the teams talk about how supportive OVHcloud and PrimeSys were. There was a real sense of genuinely trying to work together instead of just pushing the problem back to us.”
The Results
The WCG team transitioned its IT environment gradually, moving from the existing on-site VMware infrastructure to Nutanix-native services in OVHcloud. The new infrastructure is now up and running smoothly, and the solution is a similar price to an on-prem solution, but with significantly greater flexibility, agility and support, without the old hardware risks and management overheads.
“There were unexpected benefits to the migration,” Matt continued. “One of the local electricity providers needed to cut power for a full day to run tests. Historically, this would have meant losing access to our IT and a day off for staff at one site – but because of our move to cloud, we could just keep going.”
“It’s been inspiring to work with a team that has both great vision and an eye for the pragmatic details of how things will work out day-to-day,” added Matt Tebay, Director, Enterprise Business Northern Europe, OVHcloud. “We’re very proud to have delivered a resilient, transparent solution for WCG that significantly improves system reliability for staff and students – and helps the IT team to sleep better at night!”
The new solution has not only improved availability of systems for staff and students but also improved security. Every student has to use single sign-on with multifactor authentication for every application, including email, which means that all college-related traffic goes through a designated security gateway overseen by Matt’s team.
In future, the WCG team is looking at migrating their VDI solution to the cloud; with the news that Nutanix supports Omnissa Horizon as a VDI solution, the team can simply expand their Nutanix cluster and run VDI from a single location. This would not have been possible with an on-prem solution and will make subsequent upgrades both easier to manage – and invisible to users.
“OVHcloud and Nutanix is a great proposition for the education sector,” Matt concluded. “I’ve often seen my peers roll their eyes at cloud and say they can’t afford it, but we found a solution that works, is roughly the same price as on-prem, and with far better resiliency. I don’t need to worry if my primary support engineer steps on a plane to go on holiday and something goes down, because I know that there’s a provider with Nutanix specialists and customer success managers who can help me. We trust the PrimeSys team and know that they are focused on delivering long-term value for us, and together with OVHcloud, we have a reliable, future-proofed Nutanix solution with transparent pricing and a low carbon footprint: our new ‘cloud campus’ is well set up for the next decade – and beyond.”
