FEATURE CLOUD rimeSys has completed the migration of Warwickshire College Group’ s( WCG) core IT infrastructure from an onpremises environment to Nutanix running on OVHcloud, enabling the college group to create a scalable cloud campus supporting more than 11,500 users.
WCG operates five colleges across Warwickshire and supports approximately 10,000 students and 1,500 staff through a central IT team of around 30 employees. The project formed part of the college’ s wider Digital Transformation strategy to replace ageing infrastructure, improve resilience and address increasing virtualisation costs.
PrimeSys worked closely with WCG to assess a range of cloud options before recommending Nutanix on OVHcloud. According to the college, transparent pricing, predictable costs and the opportunity to validate the proposed architecture through a trial environment were key factors in selecting the solution.
Matt Tennant, Corporate Services Director – Digital & IT, Warwickshire College Group, said:“ We were looking at how we could modernise and improve our technology, in particular because a lot of the servers were coming up to end of life.”
The migration was completed during the summer holiday period to minimise disruption to teaching and learning. PrimeSys consolidated 10 virtual server hosts into a three-node Nutanix cluster hosted in OVHcloud’ s UK data centre.
“ The initial migration and creation of our‘ cloud campus’ was relatively easy to handle over the summer holidays,” said Tennant.“ The lack of ingress and egress fees on OVHcloud meant that if we messed it all up, it wouldn’ t cost us anything to get our data out again.” Following the migration, the college experienced an issue when increased student connections at the start of term were incorrectly identified as a distributed denial-of-service( DDoS) attack. Working together, PrimeSys and OVHcloud helped WCG identify the root cause and resolve the issue by separating traffic across multiple virtual IP addresses, restoring services and strengthening the architecture for future demand.
According to WCG, the new cloud environment delivers comparable costs to its previous on-premises infrastructure while providing greater flexibility, resilience and operational efficiency. The college also said the platform has strengthened security through single sign-on and multi-factor authentication across student applications.
The success of the project has prompted WCG to begin planning the next phase of its cloud strategy, with PrimeSys supporting the planned migration of the college’ s virtual desktop infrastructure( VDI) to the Nutanix platform using Omnissa Horizon.
We asked Matt Tennant, Corporate Services Director – Digital & IT, Warwickshire College Group, about the project and PrimeSys’ role in the migration.
How did the move to a cloud-based infrastructure support Warwickshire College Group’ s broader Digital Transformation strategy? Partnering with PrimeSys to migrate to the cloud has delivered superior technological
Channel partner PrimeSys has helped Warwickshire College Group modernise its IT infrastructure by migrating its virtual environment from an on-premises platform to Nutanix on OVHcloud, creating a scalable cloud campus supporting more than 11,500 users.
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