Nutanix Acropolis and Hypervisor Improves Performance, Saves Time, and Cuts Costs for Canadian School District
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- Canada
Product
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
- Nutanix NX-3000-series systems
- Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)
- Nutanix Prism management solution
Tech Stack
- Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)
- KVM hypervisor
- VMware vSphere
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Device Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD) is the largest Catholic school district in Alberta, Canada, serving over 52,000 students across 105 schools. With a workforce of more than 5,000 full and part-time staff, CCSD is dedicated to providing high-quality education to the communities it serves. The district's mission is to foster a nurturing and inclusive environment that supports the academic, spiritual, and personal growth of its students. As a large educational institution, CCSD faces the challenge of managing a vast and dispersed infrastructure while ensuring that its IT systems are efficient, cost-effective, and capable of supporting the diverse needs of its students and staff. The district's commitment to innovation and modernization is evident in its efforts to upgrade its IT infrastructure to better serve its educational mission.
The Challenge
Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD) faced challenges with their existing IT infrastructure, which relied on HP blades for compute and NetApp FAS systems for storage. The environment was virtualized using vSphere 5.5, with over 270 virtual machines for production, development, and test workloads. Despite covering a large geographical area, only two IT team members managed all data center operations. In 2010, a one-time cash infusion from the Alberta government allowed CCSD to modernize their data center with blade architectures, SANs, and VMware. However, they soon realized the need to further modernize their environment to keep up with technological advancements.
The Solution
CCSD decided to purchase a Nutanix NX-3000 series system for a VDI implementation, but later revised the project scope to focus on server environment modernization. A successful pilot project led to the migration of CCSD's entire production environment to Nutanix, including MS Exchange, in-house applications, a student information system, accounting, finance, MS SQL Server, and Oracle databases. To accommodate growth, CCSD purchased a second Nutanix system. The district also moved some infrastructure to Data Hive, a Canadian colocation facility, to reduce costs. By switching from VMware vSphere to Nutanix's built-in virtualization, CCSD saved $100,000 (CAD) annually in licensing costs. Nutanix's AHV hypervisor, built into the infrastructure stack, eliminated the need for specialized skillsets, making management easier and more affordable.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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