New Zealand's University of Waikato has migrated from on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud.
Opting for a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, the university claims to have halved its IT energy usage, reports Reseller.
The decision to move to the cloud was made when the university was faced with renewing its on-premise IT infrastructure. It decided that running its own data center had become "prohibitively expensive" and took attention away from modernization efforts.
“Traditionally, we had run and hosted our own data center," said university associate director of architecture and applications Glenn Penfold. "Through the refresh process we identified data centers had become commoditized and that we would be better off letting a professional organization run ours."
The university also cites concerns surrounding Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. which was the university's former infrastructure vendor.
“Our refresh project started in November 2023, so although we didn’t know exactly what the acquisition would mean for us, the writing was on the wall,” said Penfold.
“It was enough of a risk for us to make sure we considered alternatives.”
The Nutanix Cloud Platform, along with Nutanix's AHV hypervisor, were selected by the University of Waikato following a tender. In addition, Microsoft Azure is used for custom development applications and data integration.
Overall, the move has halved the on-premise IT at the university from 14 racks to seven.
The migration project was completed with assistance from ASI Solutions, which launched ASI Cloud in New Zealand on Nutanix's cloud platform in November 2023.
As part of the migration process, the university sold its data center to Spark NZ, a deal announced in April 2024.
At the time, Spark said it would make significant upgrades to the facilities which would be operated as a "key Edge data center" for Spark, with the university as an anchor customer of the data center. The university has since deployed the Nutanix cluster within the facility, along with a disaster recovery cluster in Spark's Takanini data center in Auckland.
According to Penfold, the whole migration project was completed by March 2024, with the original decision made the previous November.
Aaron White, general manager and vice president of Nutanix APJ Sales said the move "puts the University of Waikato well ahead of the curve and sets it up for an even brighter, greener, and smarter future.”
With the migration now complete, the university is working on a virtual desktop infrastructure project with plans to decommission up to 1,200 high-powered lab computers and provide students with remote access to high-power GPUs.
The University of Waikato's data center is connected to New Zealand's national research, science, and education digital network which connects with more than 120 networks globally to help researchers collaborate.
In 2021 the University of Waikato installed a Nvidia DGX A100 supercomputer in its data center. The computer consisted of eight A100 GPUs with a total of 320GB of GPU.
