Australian University Upgrades to ‘Top Class’ IT Infrastructure with Nutanix

The leading Kuwaiti higher education institution has standardized on Nutanix, enhancing digital learning and paving the way for ongoing innovation

Providing a world-class education to a diverse student body aspiring to lead in Engineering, Business, Aviation, and Maritime professionals requires cutting-edge facilities. As education continues to evolve from smart classrooms to remote learning – The Australian University (AU) in Kuwait remains at the forefront. 

With AU’s IT infrastructure approaching end-of-life, Hussain Al-Failakawy, Manager - Network Systems, sprang into action, working with Nutanix to deliver an overhaul that has set the institution and its students up for long-term success.

Key Benefits

Challenge

As one of Kuwait’s first privately-operated universities, The Australian University (AU) has a rich legacy. When it comes to its IT infrastructure however, it’s not legacy, but rather cutting-edge technologies that the institution prides itself on. 

“Our previous hyperconverged infrastructure solution was approaching end-of-life, which presented a perfect opportunity to evaluate the industry’s most powerful and intuitive offerings. We were especially keen on making IT ‘invisible’ so our in-house team could instead focus on innovation and continuing to introduce the latest digital learning tools into our programs,” said Al-Failakawy.

Solution

In Kuwait, few tenders are more hotly contested than government contracts which inevitably attract bids from the world’s foremost technology players. So, when Al-Failakawy found that the country’s Ministry of Education had placed its trust in Nutanix, he felt strongly compelled to engage with the vendor. 

“The IT requirements of the education sector are unique, and Nutanix’s proven expertise in serving leading institutions reaffirmed our confidence in their solution” said Al-Failakawy. 

A perfectly executed proof-of-concept (POC) quickly confirmed this caliber, and in short succession, Al-Failakawy and his team successfully migrated the University’s mission-critical workloads from the previous environment to the new Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. 

Commenting on the speed and simplicity of this migration, Al-Failakawy said, “To prevent any disruption to students’ learning programs, we started the migration on Friday evening. By Monday morning, they were back in lecture halls and labs, blissfully unaware of the major overhaul we had executed. Often, services just working without even a hint of an issue is the highest measure of success for such an IT undertaking.”

Customer Outcome

The enhanced performance, stability and reliability alone could have justified the University’s migration to Nutanix. But Al-Failakawy was quick to highlight another significant benefit. “With Nutanix, we’ve got more for less. Our enhanced infrastructure actually reduced our TCO by a fifth, allowing us to direct this budget towards forward-focused initiatives such as remote learning and AI Labs,” he said. 

“And with Nutanix being the only infrastructure provider that provides the virtualization layer, we soon plan to move from VMware to AHV, which will bring about further cost savings,” Al-Failakawy added.

Nutanix ensures its world-class technologies are complemented by equally impressive support services, allowing classes, coursework and other critical administrative functions such as admissions and enrollment to be carried out without disruption. 

“We once had an instance of a hard disk failing, and before we even noticed the issue, Nutanix’s support team had proactively raised a ticket, and the replacement was shipped and installed in a matter of mere days. Not only was my IT team saved the hours of back-and-forth communications that were previously the norm, students and faculty were unaware of any issues as the system effortlessly rebalanced the load,” Al-Failakawy explained.

Next Steps

Such performance and support have given Al-Failakawy and his team the confidence to forge ahead with further impactful IT initiatives. “With the pandemic having proven the criticality and effectiveness of remote learning, we are working to develop a truly world-class remote learning solution for students. For this, we are currently exploring Nutanix VDI, which can allow our students to remotely connect to our labs and digital learning tools in a reliable and secure manner,” he said. 

“We feel extremely well supported by Nutanix and this gives us the confidence to keep innovating and enhancing the learning experience for our valued students,” Al-Failakawy concluded.