Nutanix Powered Academic Cloud Serves Up IT On-Demand To University Researchers

公司细节

Founded in the 19th century the University of Reading has become one of the foremost research-led universities in the UK. It has over 50 research centres, many recognised as international centres of excellence, in areas including agriculture, biological and physical sciences and meteorology.

INDUSTRY

学术研究

BUSINESS NEED

以更具成本效益，安全和易于管理的方式提供公共云的可扩展性和敏捷的自助服务优势。

解决方案

• dell EMC XC系列中的Nutanix Enterprise Cloud软件
• AHV hypervisor
• Nutanix文件
• Nutanix Prism Self-service Portal and Calm

BENEFITS

• Linear scalability for affordable, fast and simple growth
• 通过自助服务门户的敏捷按需提供计算/存储资源
• 通过计算/存储平台合并显着提高存储性能
• 最多使用集成工具减少16：1数据
• AHV管理程序的使用消除了昂贵的虚拟化许可的需求
• Single pane of management for all physical and virtual resources
• Ability to build a hybrid infrastructure using Nutanix Calm application orchestration tools
  

挑战

While similar in many respects, the IT requirements of university research teams are often far removed from those of commercial workloads. In addition to vastly higher compute and storage demands, for example, research workloads can be a lot harder to predict and liable to change significantly at very short notice, as Ryan Kennedy, Academic Computing Team Manager at the University of Reading explains.

“IT has become a key research tool and it’s not unusual for academics to request access to hundreds of VMs connected to terabytes of storage one day, only to dump them and start over the next,” he said. “Delivering that kind of ad-hoc scalability using conventional servers and storage platforms is both complex and time consuming, especially for IT staff employed to support the research, not manage the infrastructure.”

在背景下，肯尼迪和他的团队发现，交付IT资源研究用户要求的IT资源越来越困难。此外，通过虚拟化解决方案的关键部分，许可成本已成为一个问题，尽管大型项目有能力为新的基础设施提供资金，但很难证明支出以满足资金有限的人的需求。

A simpler and more agile solution was clearly required and one which could be shared more equitably and automated to allow for greater hands-off management.

解决方案

在调查公共云的几种替代方案中，这是一个显而易见的候选人，但不一定像肯尼迪一样非常合适。

“尽管公共云可以提供我们所追求的按需敏捷性和自助服务管理，但不可预测的工作负载将使它更加昂贵，并且可能更艰难，更耗时。还担心数据保护和合规性，尤其是考虑到涉及的数据的敏感性以及保护知识版权的需求。”

使用Azure进行的简短且昂贵的试验证明了这些问题的有效性，此时，肯尼迪说服了大学将其现有基础设施（然后分布在多个站点）合并为一个本地数据中心。此外，该决定不简单地升级现有基础架构，而是决定切换到在Dell EMC XC系列上运行的Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS软件，以便提供与公共云相同的按需和自助服务的好处，但在更实惠，安全和可管理的方式。

该决定还被采取了切换虚拟化平台，从VMware到AHV管理程序，作为Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Software堆栈的一部分。大胆的举动，承诺节省巨大的成本，这也从容易的迁移和更简单，统一的管理方面得到了回报。

肯尼迪评论说：“将旧VM迁移到Nutanix管理程序是没有麻烦的，我们还没有找到AHV无法应付的工作量。”“ AHV管理程序还与其他企业云软件相同的棱镜控制台完全集成和管理，从而易于构建我们想要的自助服务门户，并允许学者提供自己的资源。”

选择Nutanix Enterprise Cloud平台，Integrated Prism自助服务门户（SSP）的另一个关键原因可以由客户用于构建基于Web的界面，该界面能够使用户能够直接创建和管理VMS和存储。就像他们使用公共云平台一样，但以严格控制和监督的方式。为此，管理员创建了他们为最终用户消耗的计算和存储资源（包括共享VM模板和软件图像）的项目。还可以使用其他工具来应用细粒度的访问控件，以收集使用统计信息并在违反特定阈值时提高警报。

Another important decision was to switch from legacy NAS storage to the integrated Nutanix Files – a software-defined scale-out file storage solution for unstructured data. This would enable the University to configure over a petabyte of usable storage using six load-balanced virtual file servers all in the same rack and managed from the same single pane of management provided by Nutanix Prism.

“除了较低的成本，速度和简单性被视为Nutanix文件的主要加点。例如，借助我们的Legacy NAS软件，支持团队必须使用专业接口来设置新股票，但是使用Nutanix文件，任何人都可以做到这一点，并且很容易自动化。它在几秒钟内在线可用的股票也更快，并且与单独的服务器和存储平台相关的性能瓶颈没有。”

RESULTS

Following an initial proof of concept trial using just five nodes, the scalability of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud was immediately put to the test when one of the university’s legacy IT infrastructure suppliers went out of business. Faced with having no support for key storage appliances an additional 10 nodes were quickly delivered enabling Kennedy and his team to migrate fully to the Nutanix infrastructure over a weekend and configure 400TB of storage in just 10 minutes.

他说：“这是真正的开眼界。”“借助我们的遗产存储，将花费数周的时间放入新的服务器和存储空间，但是一旦固定了Nutanix节点，我们就按了扩展按钮，10分钟后，一切都完成了。为什么我们以前不能这样做？”

除了更简单的可扩展性和增强的存储性能外，另一个好处更有效地利用了可用的存储，在阅读大学的情况下，由于内置的​​重复数据删除，擦除编码和压缩技术，物理存储开销16：1。

这并不意味着不需要额外的节点，因为根据肯尼迪的吸收，Reading Research Cloud的摄入量是“巨大的”，并且仍在增长。尽管如此，阅读团队选择利用Nutanix体系结构的固有冗余，并使用集成的云连接功能将快照带到Microsoft Azure进行备份和灾难恢复。

下一步

Team Manager Kennedy is hugely appreciative and proud of what the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud has allowed the University IT team to achieve, pointing to not just the scalability and ease of use of the platform as key enablers but the professionalism and high level of support provided by Nutanix and its partners. Support which, added to the inbuilt automation tools have enabled the University to build the self-service infrastructure they wanted and free up the support team to assist researchers with their projects rather struggling to keep the IT lights on.

他评论说：“ Nutanix平台确实改变了我们的工作方式。”“大多数情况下，我们甚至不必触摸它 - 它只是运行自己！”

That, however, doesn’t mean job done and further development of the self service portal is already underway, including the use of Nutanix Calm to extend the reach of the Research Cloud by building a hybrid infrastructure. To this end the recently acquired market-leading Calm technology adds native application orchestration and lifecycle management tools which will enable the Research Cloud to scale using, not just the on-premise infrastructure, but resources from Amazon, Azure and Google public cloud platforms all from the same unified self-service portal.

肯尼迪解释说：“尽管成本和数据保护问题有时是有意义的，尤其是在短时间需要处理大型工作量的情况下。”“因此，如果明天有学者需要100个核心，平静将使我们能够突然进入公共云以满足需求或使用亚马逊现货销售以获得最佳价值，这将成为我们自助服务门户2.0的关键组成部分。”

除了技术外，肯尼迪还认为，阅读研究云在提供更广泛的IT资源的访问权限方面起着重要作用。

“When grants are awarded some of that money is now allocated to a central fund to scale the Research Cloud to the benefit of all regardless of project budget. It is also helping academics to obtain grants by giving them affordable access to a hugely capable infrastructure in order to produce the up-front collateral required to support their applications.”