Qirx tapped by Marist College Canberra for Nutanix deployment

Canberra-based MSP Qirx has been tapped by Marist College Canberra to upgrade its IT infrastructure through the deployment of Nutanix, aimed to enhance the education experience for students and educators.

Qirx worked closely with Marist College Canberra ICT Systems and Operations manager Sam Walton to guide the College throughout its architecture transformation.

Walton said maintenance was becoming resource intensive for the College’s decades old legacy three-tier datacentre architecture including servers, storage and networking.

The Catholic school is made up of 1800 students from year 4 to 12, as well as 200 teachers which meant that improving maintenance and IT infrastructure would have significant impacts. 

The recent investment in Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, allowing Walton and his team of five to deliver greater value to the school.

“Nutanix is the heart of our digital learning experience,” he said. “We went from a full rack of SANs (storage area networks) and hosts which were much more complicated and required a lot more maintenance just to keep running, to Nutanix which is essentially ‘set up and forget’.

Qirx has helped Marist with the utilisation of three Nutanix nodes for its on-campus Disaster Recovery (DR) environment. The DR software keeps systems going in the event of an outage, and another three nodes for object storage, which enables greater data scalability for the school.

“DR is now instant,” Walton said. “For example, late last year I had to move everything to the DR site and performance wasn’t impacted at all. No one noticed any difference. This has enabled me to sleep at night because I know now if something ever goes wrong, we can seamlessly switch over to DR.”

“Qirx has been incredible. They’ve been a trusted partner, making sure the College gets the best outcome. They’re not about pushing products. They understand every school is different, has different challenges, and needs different solutions – and they really took the time to understand what would work best for us.”  

According to Walton, the College’s shift to Nutanix has reduced their hardware footprint which has in turn reduced energy consumption.

“IT infrastructure, particularly outdated infrastructure, can be a major energy burden,” he said. “Instead of a full rack, we’ve gone down to six RU (rack units) in our production environment. This has reduced power consumption to the point we’re now downsizing our UPS (uninterruptible power supply), which provides emergency power if the main power source fails.”

Walton said, “Not only are we a relatively large school with more than 2000 end-users including students and teachers, but we also offer many extracurricular activities. The role of IT is to support all the different departments and all the applications they want to run in a single environment.”

Nutanix ANZ managing director Jim Steed said this IT infrastructure boost will ensure Marist College Canberra provides an enhanced learning experience for its students into the future.

“With its IT team liberated from having to keep the lights on, Walton and the Marist IT team can focus on the things that matter – like improving the student and educator experience – rather than putting out fires and constant maintenance. At Nutanix, we believe IT infrastructure should be invisible so organisations like Marist can focus on what they do best – educating the next generation of Australian leaders,” Steed said. 

Last year, Qirx celebrated 21 years in business, specialising in cloud services like virtualisation, storage, web, backup and disaster recovery, and serving most of Southern New South Wales.

In 2018, Qirx implemented Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to six Canberra schools and colleges to improve the education experience.