Nutanix, Inc. a leader in enterprise cloud computing, has announced that California State University Long Beach (CSU LB) is leveraging Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to provide students and faculty with access to critical applications from any device at any location. By deploying Nutanix, the university’s IT team has improved its previously complicated solution; it can now spend more time focusing on student and faculty projects, helping students more easily do their work and further showcasing the university’s position as a research institution.

Faculty and students in the educational sphere are more frequently utilizing tools for digital learning and research including video lessons, remote courses, online collaboration tools and digital analytics. Both teachers and the student body now want to access each of these resources on their own personal devices, as opposed to just from traditional computer labs. As a result, IT teams in the education sector need to make sure that all applications are supported by multiple devices, including remote and mobile devices. If the IT team succeeds in carrying out a modern and innovative IT strategy, a university can boast flourishing technological resources as part of its recruitment strategy and can continue to maintain it for retention.

University IT Team Reduces Time Spent on Administrative Tasks by Running Mission-Critical and High-Performance Applications on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

Faced with similar challenges, the CSU Long Beach IT team set out to update its datacenter and selected Nutanix to run its core enterprise applications, including high-performance applications like Mathematica, MATLAB, AutoCAD, and R Software environment. The university also selected Nutanix for multiple critical functions including student application processing and the university’s identity management and authentication services, including Oracle Campus Solutions. Previously, CSU Long Beach had several IT team members spending their time managing, scaling and troubleshooting their increasingly complex IT infrastructure. By selecting Nutanix Core for the team’s essential applications, CSU Long Beach was able to modernize its infrastructure and achieve simplicity and operational efficiency for its datacenter.

In addition, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software allowed the IT team to leverage a software-based approach to streamline their IT processes and speed up the provisioning of new technology services. These results have allowed the team to improve their responsiveness: requests from end-users—such as provisioning a set of applications and virtual machines—that used to take a few hours now take only 10 minutes. The IT team is now also able to deliver improved performance for their end-users, further allowing students and faculty to focus on their work and fulfill their needs with minimal IT pain. Finally, even when end-users do face problems, the IT team now receives automatic alerts, so they can troubleshoot more quickly and effectively and can get students and faculty back on-track in no time.

Among these services, the IT department is now able to deploy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) applications—including high-performance applications—to students, which they can access from their choice of device. Previously, this software was only available in labs and in the library, which had limited operating hours. Since deploying the Nutanix solution, the CSU Long Beach IT team can now support hundreds of concurrent users and can easily scale its VDI offerings and add more licenses when demand grows.

Finally, due to the simplicity of managing the Nutanix solution, the IT team is now able to spend more time working on innovative projects with faculty and researchers. For example, the IT team recently provisioned a set of virtual machines for Dr. Chris Lowe, a marine biologist at the university, whose shark lab studies baby and juvenile white sharks of Southern California. Using these virtual machines, Dr. Lowe developed custom applications and tagged sharks to monitor their movement along the West Coast. This data will eventually be available to the general public to track shark movement. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software is being used to support the software development in house, and maintain the application once it goes live. Thanks to the IT team now having more time, they can easily help Dr. Lowe with his research and make sure that he has the right IT support in place.

“Nutanix lets us make services and software available to our students, when they need them, so that they can succeed,” said Jesse Santana, Director, System and Web Services, CSU Long Beach. “Ultimately we are here to serve students and help them graduate in four to six years and assist faculty with their research projects. By deploying Nutanix, we can better fulfill both of these missions. Our Nutanix solution is made to scale and evolve and we’re already considering new capabilities to make technology access even easier and cost-effective.”

“Universities all over the world are looking to simplify their IT infrastructure in hopes of better serving their top priorities: students and faculty,” said Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer, Nutanix. “As technology continues to advance, and university IT teams have to keep up with the latest in datacenter innovations, it is critical for them to have modern IT solutions that are easy and reliable. Personally, as an alumnus of CSU Long Beach, I’m thrilled to see the university continue to innovate, and happy that Nutanix was able to help students and faculty realize immediate and direct results.”

Additional Resources

For more information about CSU Long Beach, read the case study here.