From groundbreaking research and academic programs to re-imagining higher education, Boise State University is growing fast and blazing trails in Idaho, the U.S., and across the world.
The University depends on its infrastructure to power all its essential operations, from student learning tools and research to ERP and administrative applications. With 120,000 users, the Boise State user base is equivalent to the third-largest city in the state of Idaho. The Boise State IT team takes its responsibility for supporting all these users very seriously, and it runs the infrastructure with a private company approach that emphasizes agility and efficiency.
The University’s IT team understands that a hyperconverged architecture can help the organization move at the speed of business. Consolidating nearly all its operations onto the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), the foundation for the Nutanix Cloud Platform, and has enabled the team to achieve more with fewer resources, at less cost.
| Consolidated operations | Maximized resources | Controlled costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reduced data center footprint to 34 nodes saving power and cooling costs | Single consistent environment can be run with just five full time engineers | Achieved cost savings in licensing fees |
With Nutanix we run the entire campus infrastructure with five engineers. If we didn't run Nutanix, I don't know how many people I would need.
Boise State University is home to more than 26,000 students from every state in the U.S., and more than 60 foreign countries. The campus is growing fast, adding new state-of-the art research labs, living and dining spaces, and a high-tech visual arts space.
In the past, campus services were supported by 15 separate data centers across campus. This fragmented approach was hard to manage and scale, and IT leaders knew they needed a simpler, consolidated approach. In 2015, the organization decided a hyperconverged architecture was the best way to make its infrastructure more efficient and consistent.
The Boise State Office of Information Technology provides more than 99% of the IT services from end to end on campus, which is a very unique concept in higher education,” says Tory Jamison, Executive Director of Cloud Services and Infrastructure at Boise State University Office of Information Technology. “We have consolidated 122,000 active users, and more than 420,000 accounts in a single directory by combining all of the various directories from university colleges and auxiliary organizations into one place. Boise State is far from the largest, and only after you do this will you realize how enormous universities really are.”
To build on its strategy, the University needed a robust, scalable platform that would provide a future-ready foundation for its services.
After considering and working with several hyperconvergence solutions, Jamison and his team standardized on the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.
“Nutanix is core to our infrastructure,” he says. “You name the business, you name that the department and Nutanix is delivering them services. We have migrated everything to the environment, and there are only seven servers that are hardware servers that remain.”
Nutanix is not only comprehensive, but it delivers high performance, is simple and flexible.
“We're big fans of the concept of one,” says Jamison. “There's one hyper-converged solution on Nutanix; one hypervisor on Acropolis, one storage partner with NetAPP, one network provider with Cisco and one directory with Microsoft Active Directory. We can deliver any version of Windows Server, RedHat Linux or any of our Oracle or Microsoft SQL databases on this architecture with minimal effort.”
With Nutanix in place, Jamison can deliver all the services his thousands of users require and allocate his limited resources more efficiently.
“You can't have 15 different technologies that do the same thing and try to run it with the minimal amount of people,” says Jamison. “Now, all I have to do is employ engineers that know Nutanix or are willing to learn it. It’s how the public clouds work so efficiently. One technology driving the entire stack.”
Since migrating to Nutanix, the Boise State IT team has been able to dramatically reduce the footprint of its sprawling data center environments, setting the stage for big savings on power and cooling.
“We’ve reduced our data center size from approximately 85 server blades from our previous vendor, down to 34 nodes in our Nutanix environment,” says Jamison. “As gear gets smaller, it’s actually possible to run the whole university on two and a half racks of equipment.”
Despite its small size, the Nutanix platform delivers all the performance needed to support the most critical processes and applications across 250 buildings on campus.
We typically run between 750 and 1000 virtual machines depending on the time of year and where we are with application migrations and other upgrades. Right now, over one hundred of those VM’s are running about 680 databases of all sizes. With over 95% of all VM’s being served up by the Acropolis hypervisor. We hope to have that number closer to 99% in the coming months as we continue to move away from VMWare as software vendors become more amicable in supporting their applications on the Nutanix hypervisor.
The University is also realizing major savings on software licensing fees, moving from its previous VMware solution to Nutanix AHV hypervisor.
With nearly all of the infrastructure fully migrated to Nutanix, Jamison is now exploring ways to make the environment even more resilient and secure.
“I want to leverage Nutanix Flow for software-defined networking and microsegmentation so that I can move one of our data centers to the other side of the state, which is 300 miles away, using my 100G low latency fiber connection,” he says. “In the event of a data center failure, I can support automated failover, and do it all natively without having to buy a third-party product.”
Nutanix continues to provide a high performance, scalable, and flexible foundation to enable the Boise State IT team to support new requirements well into the future.