A plan by essex-bonded Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (Pah) to Move Some Capacity to Nutanix Cloud-Based Services is Blocked by Uncerty Over Princing AMID Us Presiding Donel Recent flurry of on-off, up-down tariffs.
Pah Saved £ 500,000 was migrated from vmware on end-of-life EMC VNX Storage Arrays to Nutanix Hyper-converged infrastructure (Hci) Several years ago.
Now its plan to use NC2 services from nutanix is blocked by pricing uncertainty that doesnys UK Public Sector Procurement Processes.
Recently, the pah it team decided on a plan to replace its existing 16 Nutanix Nodes with two five-node clusters, where the second of these would be in the cloud on Nutanix NC2.
But, said jack ciezak, infrastructure manager at the Trust, Recent Turmoil Around Tarifs And its effect on pricing has been forced the project to be put on hold.
“Being of the uncertainty with the cloud and Skyrocketing costs, we stopped,” said ciezak.
“We decide we're going to do this very slowly, meaning we're going to see what will happen, and right now, we decide to have it on-love.”
NHS PROCUREMENT
Part of the issue here is NHS PROCUREMENTWhich means it teams must evaloo
That means, if prices fluctate wildly, things can go wrong, said ciezak.
“When Nutanix Quote, it is based on today's date and what the dollar is Worth,” He said. “And then we have that for 15 or 30 days, but you cannot get everything from 30 days, essentially when your organization and your executive has to approve it.
“It has to go to the ICS [local integrated care system] To be approved by them, “said ciezak. So, before you get everything don, they say, 'Oh, now the price changed'.
“And right now, we do not know what is actually going on with the dollar.”
How will things be resolved?
Ciezak said: “I'm waiting for what will happen in the next one and a half years, when things are stable in global terms. Went to the cloud five years ago, when it was relatively new, now they Coming back because they cannot afford it. ”
Pah'S Original Move to Nutanix Came in 2019, by which time its EMC VNX external storage was seven years old and dell support has stopped in 2018. And moved to the hyper-converced infrastructure Supplier's acropolis hypervisor.
Ciezak Said He'd Never Heard of Nutanix or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) at the time, when he spoke to Computer weekly At Nutanix's .Next 2025 Event in the US Last Week.
HCI Saw Compute and Storage Bundled TogeTher in Nodes That Blad Connect in Grid-Like Fashion to Form Clusters, often with server and storage components scalable independent. This was a particular attractive proposation to customers that lacked deep skillsets as they were relatively easy to do with deployable and scalable.
“We want to the market to see what was out there and at the time we Never Knew Who Nutanix was,” He said. “Also, we We WE WERE Bombarded by the big vendors as soon as I mentioned the project on LinkedIn. So, we had always lined up to go with one of the big boys, but I had a deadline of three weeks Money Allocated [due to procurement system constraints]Nutanix said they could deliver with three weeks, and they did. “
And, according to ciezak, the Trust Saved Big by Going With Nutanix and Hyper-Converged Intead of a Traditional Storage Supplier. “We saved nearly half a million trust the other vendors came in at Around 1m while we paid Around £ 550,000 for Nutanix,” He said.
That was in addition to saveings of Around 75% on Power, Cooling and Datentre Floorspace as the EMC setup's 30 nodes and 2x 42u of rack space was reduced to 16 Nutanix nodes. That setup now supports Around 450 Virtual Machines and 260 different applications.
Initially, Nutanix was configured with the microsoft hyper-V hypervisor beCause ciezak was well versed in it, but nutanix triad to persuade Him to go with their account.
“Nutanix offered us ahv,” said ciezak. “I said, 'no, I have no idea who you are. will consider ahv. ''
After that, some microsoft hyper-V functionality became unsupported in Nutanix. That prompted Him to consider migrating to ahv, and that took place during the christmas period in 2024.
The same number of Nutanix Nodes Remained-16 split between two sites-but the hypervisor was migrated from Hyper-V to Nutanix's Ahv.
The key benefits for ciezak was latency, boot time and general ease of management. “Latence between nodes and vm guests on Hyper-V is 15 millisecond-plus. On ahv it is sub-millisecond,” He said. “Hyper-V is a hypervisor over a hypervisor. Using ahv and [Nutanix’s OS] Aos, you don't have to go through the Virtual Storage Protocols Anymore, because you directly access the storage.
“That was the biggest gain,” added ciezak. “To boot in windows, when we do we doing windows updates on a monthly Basis, let's say Say Server 2016 on Hyper-V, It Took About Seven Minutes to Do The Boot. Now, IT Takes 15 SECONDS OON AHV.”