Cost-cautious Bond University edges into the cloud

Bond University has replaced part of an on-premises environment of 700 Dell servers and VMware with cloud in preparation for a broader transformation. 

The Gold Coast-based university has set up Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure, which now houses 20 percent of its workloads.

It is continuing to run some workloads in AWS and on-premises as well, but is exploring hybrid and multi--cloud options for the remainder of its workloads and data. 

“The big work is where do we put our data, and that’s what we need to take our time with,” Bond University director of IT Ann Yardley told iTnews at the Nutanix Next conference in Barcelona.

“We need to pick the right platform to put it on and put it where the academics need it to be, whether that’s AWS or Azure.

“On-premises is really secure, but it doesn’t give us that innovation and that flexibility, so we’re looking to balance the two.”

Yardley said she wanted to “move workloads to where they needed to be” but still have “agility for the organisation”.

The decision to go with NC2 on Azure was made in part because Azure is Bond's 'primary cloud provider".

“We have a big relationship with Microsoft; a lot of universities do. We wanted to make sure we had some synergies there and that’s what led us to NC2," she said.

Yardley said she was mindful of building cloud cost optimisation skills internally, to ensure any future migrations made economic sense.

Yardley is also looking to merge and streamline other technology vendors and will likely start replicating Nutanix as a backup, replacing its existing Commvault.

“We have the infrastructure now,” she said. “The next stage is the archiving and data management solutions and determining the right location and how to do that. When we do set that up, we want to ensure it is cost-effective.”

Eleanor Dickinson attended Nutanix Next in Barcelona as a guest of Nutanix.