Canada’s national museums boost technology operations with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure
Key Results
Ingenium, a crown corporation in Ottawa, Canada, operates three nationally recognized museums: the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum, the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, and the Canada Science and Technology Museum.
Their mission is to provide multi-sensory experiences that immerse young and old alike in the countless ways science and technology connect with Canadians’ everyday lives. Ingenium honors people and communities who have shaped history and inspires the next generation by telling the stories of people who think differently and test the limits.
Ingenium’s IT services, being a corporate function, provide all the IT infrastructure for the entire organization and the intercampus links between those three museums. Ingenium found a transformative ally in Nutanix, whose cutting-edge solutions came to the rescue, promising to revitalize its IT infrastructure and ensure the continuity of its mission to make science and technology accessible to all.
“Working with the Nutanix implementation team was fantastic. Having hands-on, local representatives and 24/7 support was instrumental in the success of our project.”
Ingenium was faced with the need to have a full refresh of their virtualized environment which included servers, storage, and a new backup system.
Director of IT Services Michael D’Eon emphasized the importance of the refresh:
"We had some aging infrastructure here at Ingenium. Our servers, our storage, and our backups were all getting long in the tooth at the same time."
“We really needed to get on a modern platform to solidify our on-prem IT infrastructure with modern tools to set the foundation for our journey for the next 5 to 10 years. It was a great opportunity for us to go through a refresh and look at HCI versus the traditional SAN model. We needed something modern and scalable should we decide to jump to the cloud at some point. We were seeking an organization to help us meet those demands,” shared D’Eon
D’Eon added a technical perspective to the challenges, noting the disparate systems and the lack of integration. "To be honest, it was just running aging hardware that was end of life. To support the end of life on the hardware side was a challenge. Things did not talk to each other as well as we wanted; they were siloed," he explained. This fragmentation resulted in operational inefficiencies, with the IT team managing multiple vendor relationships and systems that could not seamlessly share information or provide a unified view of the IT environment.
“We are a federal Crown corporation but also revenue-generating. We are customer-facing; when things are down, our flow of cash at our museums, admissions, and boutiques are down. And production as a whole. If emails are down, if our system is down, all these are housed on-prem in our data center. Time is money, right? You'll want to keep downtime to a minimum for sure,” explained D’Eon
Ingenium's commitment to making science and technology accessible to all drove its ambitious digitization project. D’Eon highlighted the significance of this initiative, stating, "We want to digitize items available at our museums, so, for example, if you're a train aficionado in Vancouver or Korea, you don't physically need to walk through our museums to have exposure to our collection."
This vision required a robust and scalable IT infrastructure capable of supporting the massive digital archives generated by the digitization process. Ingenium’s continuous goal is to increase global access and preserve digital assets for future generations, necessitating a solution that could offer both capacity and reliability in storing and managing digitized collections.
In 2021, Ingenium began its partnership with Nutanix, adopting three key solutions that transformed its IT infrastructure and digital capabilities. Each solution addressed specific needs and challenges, collectively contributing to a more resilient, efficient, and scalable IT environment.
The Files Storage Cluster emerged as a critical component in Ingenium's digitization initiative, providing a robust and scalable storage solution for the vast amounts of digitized museum collections and artifacts. D’Eon remarked on the importance of this solution, saying, “This is where the files and those storage nodes gave us the flexibility to just add that onto our existing cluster without requiring compute and networking, right? So it was a nice bolt-on." This adaptability ensured that Ingenium could manage its digital assets effectively, facilitating global access to its collections. D’Eon highlighted, “Part of our backup solution was that we went with Veeam. One of the great things about Nutanix was its integration and partnership with Veeam, especially after version 12.”
Adopting Nutanix's AHV as their hypervisor of choice marked a significant departure from their previous VMware environment. AHV provided Ingenium with a streamlined, integrated virtualization environment, reducing complexity and costs.
Ingenium’s implementation of Nutanix’s AOS Storage solution was critical to their IT framework. D’Eon offered insights into its crucial role in their infrastructure: “With Nutanix, things are being done during the production day in the background. So, I see less overtime cost for my operational team. We don't need to come in on the weekends and have a maintenance window because of the nodes' robustness and things happening in the background.” This capacity to seamlessly accommodate an expanding array of workloads highlights AOS Storage as a cornerstone of Ingenium's strategy to foster a dynamic and resilient IT ecosystem.
Uptime stability
In light of changing work patterns and the necessity for reliable technology infrastructure, D’Eon noted the significance of maintaining operational continuity at Ingenium, “If we're down, we're losing money. So, the fact that our data center is up means our uptime is 99.9%. We're so reliant on technology now that end users assume things will work daily. I will add that with the pandemic, the way people work is different now. People are working from home, they're working evenings, they're working weekends. It's not the traditional Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. The IT infrastructure is 24/7. It doesn't sleep. It doesn't turn off at 5 pm. Now we have a very stable virtualized environment with failover, and redundancy helps us sleep well at night.”
Sustainable savings
The economic and environmental benefits that Ingenium realized through its partnership with Nutanix directly impacted its data center's physical and carbon footprint. “There was cost savings. One of the main things for me is the smaller footprint in our data center. The fact that our footprint is smaller means less cooling, less power, and a reduction in our overall carbon footprint because environmental factors all come into play. So having the computer, the storage, and everything networking all in one box definitely minimizes the amount of racking and space you require,” D’Eon explained.
Simplified implementation
The client emphasizes the ease and efficiency of the implementation process, “It was a fairly standard implementation. Working with the Nutanix implementation team was great. We did our requirements gathering. We took a snapshot of our existing VMs and computed the workload in today's VM world, Nutanix being, you know, a direct competitor. They work their magic. They came out with their calculations. We also wanted to scale up. So we put in 20% projected growth. We had some runway for ramping up the number of VMs.”
Smooth operations
The shift to Nutanix has brought seamless operational capabilities at Ingenium, fundamentally changing how the IT team manages and deploys resources. “I've seen a marked improvement in stability, uptime, and the ease of deploying a VM. We can turn around a VM for one of our groups very quickly. Jean-Michel's got everything under one pane of glass, making it easy to monitor. The whole way that Nutanix is engineered for failover, when those nodes fail, it's seamless,” D’Eon shared.
This transition has minimized disruptions and enhanced the reliability of their services, providing a seamless experience for end users even in the event of a node failure. Jean-Michel Petrin, Ingenium’s Network Services Administrator, echoed this sentiment, adding, “It’s been amazing. It's easy to read and easy to find information. The notifications are great as well. What is helpful is all the support that I've been getting.”
Ingenium plans to strengthen its partnership with Nutanix to accommodate its growing needs and ambitions. D’Eon shares his comfort in knowing Ingenium’s partnership with Nutanix will be long-lasting, “When we signed the contract with Nutanix, everything came with five years of licensing and support. It's nice to know my costs are set. From a budgeting standpoint, knowing everything is bundled for five years provides peace of mind." In response to plans to expand the use of Nutanix solutions in the future, Petrin stated, “We’ll need more horsepower and another node. Because everything's been working so well, and as operating systems grow, we'll need more power.”
As Ingenium embarks on its next chapter with Nutanix, the museum stands at the cusp of a transformative era where the fusion of heritage and technology opens new horizons for accessibility, learning, and engagement.
Nutanix, Inc. is not affiliated with VMware by Broadcom or Broadcom.