PHBern gets a solution from a single source with Nutanix

The Challenge

PHBern is one of Switzerland’s largest universities of teacher education. It trains and educates teachers and headteachers as well as engaging in research and development. In addition, PHBern offers a wide array of services. The existing virtualisation environment at PHBern, which was operated by a partner, increasingly caused problems for the administration department as it wasn’t multi-client capable. “Our work became more and more cumbersome”, said Peter Struder, Head of Systems Technology at PHBern. Since it was time to renew the hardware, the specialists at PHBern assessed the options on the market. “We got various offers. A pure cloud solution would have been outrageously expensive”, Studer recalled.

“So, with the help of Axians Amanox, we arrived at Nutanix. This decision was made easier by the fact that Nutanix is an all-in-one solution.”

The Solution

Together with Axians Amanox, PHBern’s IT department evaluated Nutanix AOS/AHV, a solution comprising hardware and software from a single manufacturer/partner. “Nutanix is an innovative product with an attractive price-performance ratio”, added Peter Studer, explaining that “a point of contact such as the one we have in our local partner, Axians Amanox, makes problem-solving much easier.” Studer emphasised the importance of this, as PHBern doesn’t have a large IT department. “Our main task is to operate the IT infrastructure. We simply lack the expertise required to reconstruct a virtualisation system on our own.” Thanks to the standalone virtualisation solution, PHBern was able to quickly and seamlessly migrate its entire server environment. Nutanix Move is a high-performance solution which allows virtual servers to be easily and reliably migrated from VMware to Nutanix. All of the university’s internal servers, of which 90 were Windows-based (versions 2012 to 2019) and 25 were on Linux, now all run on Nutanix. Cloud connectivity is also guaranteed now. Summing up his experience, Peter Studer added:

“Our migration process has gone very well – Nutanix Move is a really cool tool.”

Tools & Technologies

Nutanix AHV
Nutanix Move

Next Steps

Establishing geo-redundancy and a VDI environment. “We will definitely have a closer look at the possibilities offered by the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud for this.”

CUSTOMER: PH Bern
PHBern is one of Switzerland’s largest universities of teacher education. It trains and educates teachers and headteachers as well as engaging in research and development. In addition, PHBern offers a wide array of services.