Swinburne boosts student productivity using Nutanix

SWINBURNE University of Technology is developing a ‘hybrid cloud’ aimed at eliminating time-consuming and administrative tasks for its IT team and final year students. 

Swinburne is using Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to provide an efficient, self-service experience to its technology students for their final year projects.

Melbourne-based Swinburne University of Technology is well regarded globally for its commitment to providing an education to sections of society otherwise denied further education, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. 

The Swinburne curriculum focuses heavily on technology and its IT team was looking for a way to deliver easy-to-use services to students through infrastructure that enabled the university to scale and automate those services.  

Swinburne deployed the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to provide an efficient, self-service experience to the technology students for their final year projects.

The self-service portal works like an application store, where students can browse, choose and deploy the IT solution they need for their final year projects with a single click, including complex mobile application development programs.

The students are also able to take advantage of other automated services, such as quickly procuring more storage when they need it. Behind the scenes, the Swinburne IT team uses Nutanix Calm to automate these processes and also migrate workloads and apps between cloud environments.

Prior to this latest deployment, building the infrastructure needed to support student requests could take weeks and months, according to Swinburne IT director of infrastructure and operations, Simon Naughton.

He said the process had previously created extra work for the IT team and the students had to wait a long time before they could start their programming projects. In addition, keeping up with IT requests from students required the manual and time-consuming task of setting up infrastructure in response to their needs, he said.

“We selected Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software because it supports our hybrid cloud strategy of migrating workloads back and forth between public cloud and on-premises without having to think about it,” Mr Naughton said.

“However, the real benefit is for the students. Nutanix and our IT partner, Thomas Duryea Logicalis, help us keep Swinburne students focused on researching and developing the applications they are building, which ultimately provides them with a better education.” 

The experience so far has been that, using Nutanix, Swinburne spends less time on provisioning services and the students themselves are more satisfied with IT support and more productive in their studies.

“Universities across Australia, and particularly technology universities, are growing fast, and students expect the right digital resources to be in place to support their education,” Nutanix senor vice president and head of the Asia-Pacific region, Matt Young said.

“Swinburne understands this trend and has found a simple, modern way to use the hybrid cloud and ensure their students’ attention is focused on their education, not technology requests.

“With the Nutanix software, all the key elements for success are fully integrated into one simple solution.”

www.nutanix.com

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