WCG

Warwickshire College Group (WCG) is a further and higher education provider with five college facilities across five sites. Offering over 400 courses across 41 different subject areas from agriculture to brickwork and music production to motor vehicle repair, the group offers educational experiences that are designed to boost employability.

The 30-strong IT team is run as a ‘business within a business’ and supports approximately 11,500 users including 10,000 students and 1,500 staff. 

As an education provider, the WCG team is constantly looking for ways to improve, streamline and make its IT simpler, more robust and reliable. The estate was primarily based on an on-prem VMware deployment on Dell servers, and hosted applications for students and staff alike, including student records, enrolment data and file storage as well as back-office functions like finance and HR systems. 

In addition to their own research, Matt’s team spoke with existing supplier PrimeSys, an IT solutions and services provider based in Gloucestershire. PrimeSys were brought in as a longstanding trusted partner, to provide advice and help assess the available options.

“We were looking at how we could modernize and improve our technology, in particular because a lot of the servers were coming up to end of life. We were also tracking the impact of Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, which was going to increase our IT costs significantly. The challenge was that although we could replace individual parts relatively easily, we didn’t want to push the resilience of the overall system. It was time for a change.” 

Matt Tennant, Corporate Services Director - Digital & IT, Warwickshire College Group.

WCG and PrimeSys continued to explore different options but found it increasingly difficult to obtain timely and consistent answers on both the technical and cost aspects of the service from their hyperscale cloud provider. Consequently, PrimeSys recommended looking at Nutanix on OVHcloud.

“We take our duty to our customers very seriously. But the early stages of the project were challenging and a little frustrating. There were delays in technical responses and the pricing from the hyperscaler was complicated and opaque. We like to work in an open and transparent way with our customers, ensuring they have a clear view of costs but this was proving difficult and Matt was concerned that he would be writing a blank cheque each month. In contrast, OVHcloud’s simple cost model with no hidden fees enabled us to give Matt the clarity he needed for accurate budgeting.”

Ian Curry, Director at PrimeSys

WCG and PrimeSys chose Nutanix on OVHcloud Bare Metal HGR HCI i3 servers in OVHcloud’s UK datacentre, using a dual Intel Xeon configuration with 1.5TB RAM and 12x 3.84 TB SSD storage drives, as well as an IP Load Balancer for traffic across the three cloud nodes. This was a substantial consolidation from the ten virtual server hosts that the WCG team was previously running, greatly simplifying operations and saving on management time. 

WCG opted for a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model, purchasing Nutanix licensing and support from PrimeSys, together with Nutanix Professional Services. 

The OVHcloud and PrimeSys teams set up a chat channel for testing and issues resolution, as well as liaising with JANET to avoid any bottlenecks when peering with the high-speed academic network.

Although PrimeSys and OVHcloud are listed on the G-Cloud 14 framework, WCG procured the solution via the NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) framework — a centrally managed route used across the NHS and wider public sector to simplify compliant technology purchasing.

What is the JANET network?
The JANET Network is the UK's national research and education network (NREN). Built on over 8,500 km of optical fibre, it connects more than 700 institutions — and is Europe's busiest network of its kind. For WCG, Janet provides the high-speed uplinks from its five campus sites into regional Points of Presence at Worcester, Coventry, and London. It underpins both day-to-day connectivity and the data path to OVHcloud — which is why the PrimeSys and OVHcloud teams liaised directly with JANET during implementation to ensure peering wouldn't become a bottleneck.

The new solution has not only improved availability of systems for staff and students but also improved security. Every student has to use single sign-on with multifactor authentication for every application, including email, which means that all college-related traffic goes through a designated security gateway overseen by Matt’s team. 

In future, the WCG team is looking at migrating their VDI solution to the cloud; with the news that Nutanix supports Omnissa Horizon as a VDI solution, the team can simply expand their Nutanix cluster and run VDI from a single location. This would not have been possible with an on-prem solution and will make subsequent upgrades both easier to manage - and invisible to users.

“OVHcloud and Nutanix is a great proposition for the education sector. I’ve often seen my peers roll their eyes at cloud and say they can’t afford it, but we found a solution that works, is roughly the same price as on-prem, and with far better resiliency. We trust the PrimeSys team and know that they are focused on delivering long-term value for us, and together with OVHcloud, we have a reliable, future-proofed Nutanix solution with transparent pricing and a low carbon footprint: our new ‘cloud campus’ is well set up for the next decade – and beyond.”

Matt Tennant, Corporate Services Director - Digital & IT, Warwickshire College Group