Nutanix, the next-generation enterprise computing company, has announced that it is working with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute to provide the IT infrastructure for collaborative work between pharmaceutical and biotech companies that will see the Institute’s research rapidly translated into practical therapies for the benefit of humankind.

Large-scale collaborations with commercial partners required new ways of working, the construction of new buildings on the Wellcome Genome Campus and a new IT infrastructure, based on Nutanix hyperconverged technology.

The Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform can be easily scaled to meet growth in demand as the campus grows.

“We were faced with the relentless challenge of needing to be able to deliver production-class IT to an unknown number of commercial partners,” explains Simon Binley, Principal ICT Project Manager, Sanger Institute. “In that uncertain environment, Nutanix gives us the certainty of knowing that we can scale our infrastructure to meet the needs of those commercial partners, regardless of how many or what those needs might be. Nutanix is enabling us to take a more considered approach and grow the infrastructure as rapidly as we need.”

Software-defined storage and integrated management will enable the virtualisation team at the Sanger Institute to handle storage provisioning on the new infrastructure themselves. Nutanix will also enable the Sanger Institute to work with any major hypervisor to deliver affordable IT services to commercial partners no matter how big or small their budgets.

 

“Agility is what the Nutanix platform is delivering for us,” comments Binley. “We’re starting with just two commercial partners, but expect to grow rapidly over the next 18 months to support the IT needs of 30 or more bio-startups all expecting a scalable, on-demand, IT platform.”