31 October 2017

Existing workloads, typically, running meteorological modelling, brain analysis and other demanding academic applications, have already been migrated to the new infrastructure.

The University of Reading is migrating academic support workloads from a mixed collection of legacy platforms to an all-new Reading Research Cloud built on a single cluster of appliances.

The university has consolidated five different compute and ten storage platforms previously located across multiple sites into one data centre. It is now running the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform on Dell EMC’s XC Series appliances located in a single rack.

Ryan Kennedy, Reading’s academic computing team manager, says the setup offered a more cost-effective alternative to moving everything into the cloud, and has enabled the university to deliver the equivalent of a public cloud service in its own data centre.

He adds that the ability to automate management processes and make compute, storage and network resources available directly to users was also key to the decision.

“We simply allocate resources on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, leaving users free to configure and manage their virtual machines, storage and network connections as they wish using the Nutanix Self Service Portal. This frees up staff to support academic users with the design, running and support of those workloads, rather than spending all their time keeping the infrastructure lights on.”

As part of the migration, Kennedy and his team have switched from using VMware to Nutanix’s hypervisor. The platform also features the capability to take snapshots to Microsoft Azure for backup and disaster recovery.