USC Marshall School of Business Deploys Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

Nutanix, Inc. announced that University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business has deployed its Enterprise Cloud to run all of the school’s mission-critical workloads.

Since deployment, the school has seen improved performance, decreased datacenter complexity and space required, and increased responsiveness and strategic support for faculty and student needs.

Currently, IT teams at many educational institutions are feeling increasing pressure to build a cloud-like IT infrastructure that supports the latest educational-technology advancements without the cost unpredictability of public cloud services. Faculty research uses sizable amounts of data and analytics, and students need to access digital classroom resources from any device. Each faculty and student need triggers technology requests, which IT must respond to quickly. Business schools, in particular, are tasked with the challenge of properly equipping their students with the technology training needed to emerge as leaders after graduation.

Facing similar growth, performance and agility demands, USC Marshall sought to modernize their datacenter to provide compute resources and applications to all of its staff, faculty, and students. Beforehand, management of their blade servers and storage environment was time consuming and required coordination across multiple teams, so IT was not able to get applications up and running as quickly as their end users required.

The team set out to remedy these problems with a hyperconverged infrastructure solution that would accommodate the school’s requirements. The IT organization hoped to find a solution that would abstract and manage the entire datacenter, allowing the team to focus on the school’s applications. Ultimately, USC Marshall chose Nutanix as it a solution that met all of the school’s criteria: it met their needs without sacrificing performance and could survive node failures, block failures and network failures.

The school began to see immediate results in their operational simplicity and ability to scale after deploying the Nutanix Core solution. The team underwent the deployment in a couple of weeks and the installation was simple and required no additional training. The school is running all of its student and faculty research applications-SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Java, web apps, domain controllers, and DNS-on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.

The solution has cut the team’s energy consumption by 50%, which helped them align with the university’s priority to help the planet with green initiatives.

One of the most important benefits of the solution is the school’s ability to better support faculty and students. The team can fulfill faculty requests in 20% the amount of time it used to take. In addition, as a result of switching to Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution, adapting the datacenter to increased usage overtime is simple. Furthermore, the team has the time to sit down with faculty to understand their strategic needs, and determines the best course of action based on each specific conversation. In one circumstance, based on a faculty member’s requirement for a quick response, the team turned around an environment for him in a couple of days and can add capacity for him whenever it’s needed.

Finally, given the scaling simplicity and speed of deployment, the IT team is also running all of its virtual desktops (VDI) on Nutanix and can give every single USC Marshall student his/her own simply, adding additional desktops as needed. This additional VDI access provides students with access to some of the technology and software they’ll need to use in their professional lives following graduation and further prepares them in their endeavors to be leaders in the business world.

“I’ve been at USC 20 years, and the biggest shift I’ve seen in that time is the increased expectation of IT resources from our end users,” said Dan Lewis, associate director of operations and infrastructure services, USC Marshall. “The ease of scaling our Nutanix solution to accommodate end-user requests allows us to seamlessly meet demand to support the school’s research and student projects, helping the school reach an even higher level of academic excellence. It’s really easy to be an IT hero with Nutanix.“

“Increasingly, IT teams in universities and higher education are expected to deliver ad-hoc requests in a timely and effective manner,” said John Pellettiere, national sales director, SLED, Nutanix. “In order to properly serve educators’ and students’ needs, university IT teams need to embrace the latest datacenter and cloud technologies to streamline their operations and focus on what really matters. In the same vein, Nutanix is thrilled that our technologies have supported USC Marshall in its mission of preeminent innovation in business education.“

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