Science Museum turns to Nutanix

A publicly funded organisation, the SMG includes the historic Science Museum in central London, the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, Yorkshire, the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, the National Railway Museum in York and Locomotion in Shildon, County Durham. The group recently identified digital transformation as key to a group-wide mission to ‘inspire futures’; a strategy focusing on the digital experiences of its audiences - both at the group's museums and online - as well as building a sustainable and scalable technical infrastructure to deliver on current objectives and future endeavours.

Nutanix solutions are at the heart of these plans with the SMG, by adding its AOS software to a comprehensive programme of network and security upgrades to connect with public cloud services, with the aim of building a scalable, secure and highly available hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The solution was designed and implemented by Eurotech Computer Services, a Nutanix Master Partner. Its dedicated and expert Nutanix certified technical teams supported the SMG throughout the project and brought the solution to life.

In completing the first phase of this programme, the SMG has already achieved several key milestones, not least the virtualisation of all IT workloads, including key apps needed to manage buildings, visitors, volunteers, collections and school visits, all of which are operating successfully. Significantly, this goal was achieved with minimal disruption and without additional licensing costs through the use of the integrated Nutanix AHV hypervisor.

Centralised management of both physical and virtual resources is now possible with Nutanix Prism. “Our teams now benefit from Nutanix’s linear scalability to cope with future growth, in addition to much needed data backup and disaster recovery capabilities,” explains Amardeep Rai, Head of ICT Programmes for the Science Museum Group. “We’ve gone from having a hard to scale infrastructure with limited disaster recovery facilities, to a highly automated and available solution, enabling us to move forward with confidence and concentrate our efforts on harnessing the potential of digital.”

Mr. Rai is also pleased with how easy it was for staff to get to grips with the Nutanix software and by how seamlessly it fits with the group’s cloud-first digital aspirations: “We wanted a virtualisation platform that could take full advantage of other core infrastructure services, as well as one that didn’t require yet another management interface or specialised skill set to go with it,” he commented before continuing. “Nutanix has given us all that, and more.”

Having now completed the migration to a new consolidated data centre and the building of a second backup and disaster recovery facility, SMG is already using Nutanix to provide local services at remote satellite sites. It is also facilitating the next phase of its transformation plans which, thanks to Nutanix, are already at an advanced stage.

Commenting on the SMG deployment, Dom Poloniecki, General Manager of Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa region, Nutanix, said: “The Science Museum Group has secured its future and is set to inspire a growing international audience for a long time to come, thanks to its forward-thinking approach to digital transformation and the adoption of a hybrid approach to cloud computing. This migration of workloads to Nutanix means the Science Museum Group is ideally placed to harness the potential of digital technology, and we look forward to continuing to work with them on future developments.”