Pennsylvania Public School Relies on Nutanix to Power Education, Administration

SOLUTION

When a key network administrator at Avon Grove was invited to learn more about Nutanix at a boot camp for local districts, he saw tremendous potential in Nutanix Enterprise Cloud. Built on the industry’s leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology, it integrates compute, storage, virtualization and networking in a single full-stack solution.

“I went to the boot camp and I was instantly sold by the way it was set up using the one-click interface,” says Mike Tustin, Network Administrator at Chester County Intermediate Unit supporting Avon Grove. “Everything was intuitive and easy, and I was impressed by all the storage space we would save physically, and the energy savings. The benefits were obvious—we could replace racks full of devices with one little chassis.”

A top requirement for the solution was that it include a native DR platform for the District’s critical applications and 10TB of vital data. Xi Leap, provides an integrated, turnkey service. Xi Leap enables Avon Grove to quickly, intelligently protect the applications and data in its Nutanix environment, without having to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure stack.

“We have had experiences with third-party vendors, and it was not a positive one,” says Mattei. “When we heard Xi Leap would be available, it helped seal the deal to Nutanix. We like its single pane of glass, and with that the ability to upload our data directly to the DR solution.”

The Nutanix solution lets Avon Grove support its most critical applications on one hyperconverged platform, to simplify administration.

“We use it largely for PowerSchool, our Student Information System and file services,” says Mattei. “We run five instances simultaneously on the Nutanix system, including our production, test environment, and scheduling environment. And we keep snapshots of previous years. We’re very pleased with our performance so far.”

“Our authentication servers are all virtual now,” says Tustin. “You can consolidate everything you need into one box, and that is what we are doing.”

Avon Grove also replaced its previous hypervisor with Nutanix AHV, which further simplifies its administration, and lets the District avoid the escalating licensing fees of its previous solution.

“Our previous system was too expensive to keep every year,” says Tustin. “We could save a lot more going to the native hypervisor. It also helps us reduce complexity. Technically, I don’t like things being overly complicated. The less help I require to work with a solution, the better.”

BENEFITS

With Xi Leap in place, Avon Grove no longer has to grapple with complex fixes or support calls to third parties to keep its DR system running. Its IT team enjoys simpler operation and peace of mind.

“Nutanix did a great job in extending one-click disaster recovery to the cloud,” says Mattei. “It’s now much easier than our previous experience that was extremely time consuming and complicated. When you consider the time we were spending on it, it really wasn’t the best return on our investment.”

Nutanix Technical Support provided guidance every step of the way, enabling the District to rapidly unlock the benefits of its new solution.

“I was highly impressed with the team that helped set up DR platform,” says Tustin. “I felt that I was in good hands the whole time. If I saw something that I didn’t understand, they were on my computer figuring out what my local problem was, and helping solve it.”

Mattei and his team experienced not only smoother management, but improved performance, with the Nutanix solution.

“I was surprised at the speed with which we could do things,” says Mattei. “Under our old system, protecting Virtual Machines (VMs) might take the better part of a day for setup and configuration. With Nutanix, the process was done in ten minutes.”

End users accessing the District’s applications are reporting better performance as well.

“A lot of my VMs are performing better, and I’ve started hearing praise about how fast it is to reboot or do other functions,” says Mattei.

NEXT STEPS

Mattei and his team view the District infrastructure as much more than simply an information service, but as a foundation for extending instruction beyond traditional limitations.

“At the K12 level, we will continue move toward more of an asynchronous learning environment that can support students whether they are at school or at home,” says Mattei. “We need an infrastructure that supports that, not only in terms of educational applications devices, but our Student Information System.”

With its new Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure in place, backed by dependable, intuitive DR from Xi Leap, the Avon Grove IT team is confident in its ability to deliver the applications its teachers and administrators need to be productive and focus on students.