Massey University

Massey University is a university based in Palmerston North, New Zealand, with significant campuses in Albany and Wellington. The university has approximately 35,000 students, making it New Zealand’s second largest university when not counting international students. The University retired its legacy 3 tier architecture and implemented the Nutanix platform to run all enterprise applications. As a result, they reduced workload complexity and are more cost-effective.

The challenges that influenced the university to look for a solution

In 2013 the university had a remote datacentre and needed to replace a SAN and a couple of ESX hosts. They wanted to get rid of all the hardware and storage because of the high maintenance costs. At that time, hyper converged was still relatively new and Nutanix wasn’t as well-known as it is nowadays. However, the university was soon convinced that Nutanix would be a great low risk solution. After the initial implementation, they replaced a kit in their main datacentre. Which again, a new Nutanix cluster was started for.

Key considerations in the decision-making and implementation process

When the university started to use Nutanix, they were not aware that BEarena (now an ASI Solutions company) operated in the New Zealand market so the first procurement of hardware was via a local provider. It wasn’t until they needed more hardware for their infrastructure that BEarena came into the picture.

Quoting together with 3 other competitors, BEarena turned out to be the most cost-effective choice and lives up to the promise of being a dedicated partner. During the implementation process, they quickly experienced how easy it is to set up and maintain Nutanix technology. You don’t need to be a storage engineer to use Nutanix; you simply follow the documentation. The university is an early adopter of Nutanix technology and continued to build on it ever since. The university’s long-term goal is to be fully hyper converged and run completely on Nutanix.