The University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) needed to enhance reliability and flexibility across its learning environment. Stephen Payne, UniSQ Associate Director, Hosting Infrastructure, explains how the university overhauled its core IT infrastructure with Nutanix, cutting its footprint by 52% while keeping learning platforms and student services running smoothly.
Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has announced that the University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ) has modernised its core IT infrastructure with the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution, strengthening its ability to deliver reliable, flexible learning experiences and support future technology needs.
With campuses in Toowoomba, Springfield and Ipswich, and more than 25,000 students studying on-campus and online, UniSQ has long been a leader in flexible education. Supporting this model requires highly reliable, scalable digital infrastructure to ensure consistent access to learning platforms, academic systems and student services.
In late 2024, UniSQ undertook a strategic review of its virtualisation environment to ensure it could continue to meet growing demand and evolving expectations across teaching and learning. Rather than pursuing a like-for-like replacement, the university chose to invest in a modern, integrated platform to improve performance, simplify management and support future innovation.
“Changing something as fundamental as our virtualisation platform is a major decision and we approached it with a clear focus on long-term capability,” said Stephen Payne, UniSQ Associate Director, Hosting Infrastructure.
“We wanted to strengthen the foundations of our environment – improving reliability today while giving us the flexibility to evolve as our needs change. Nutanix provided a platform that aligned with that direction.”
Working with Nutanix Professional Services, UniSQ implemented the Nutanix Cloud Platform, including AHV hypervisor, to streamline its infrastructure and accelerate deployment.
According to Payne, the university achieved its migration on deadline. It migrated its Test and Development environment (500 VM) and production environment (around 300 VMs and appliances), including business-critical applications, such as the Moodle-based learning and teaching system, uConnect student and staff portal and PeopleSoft ERP system. Its Oracle databases now run on NCP.
“We had a clear timeframe to work to and the combination of platform capability and implementation support allowed us to move quickly while maintaining confidence in the outcome,” said Payne. “Equally important was ensuring we had the right architecture and documentation in place to support future initiatives, including containerisation, cloud integration and new digital services.”
Since adopting Nutanix, UniSQ has reduced its infrastructure footprint by 52% based on UniSQ’s internal assessment, consolidating workloads while maintaining strong performance and improving operational efficiency.
“Previously, managing performance and capacity required significant manual effort across multiple systems,” Payne said. “Now we have a more streamlined environment where resources can be managed proactively, helping us maintain consistent performance for both students and staff.”
The new platform also enables UniSQ to mitigate potential disruptions during maintenance and upgrades – critical in an environment where teaching and assessment occur continuously throughout the year.
“When you’re supporting students studying across different modes and timeframes, downtime isn’t really an option,” continued Payne. “The ability to manage and update systems while mitigating potential disruptions is a significant step forward for us.”
Michael Alp, Managing Director, Nutanix A/NZ, said the university is positioned to adapt quickly to future needs and innovate without complexity or compromise. “Education has always been critical, but the rapid-fire pace at which entire industries are evolving today makes education more important than it has ever been,” said Alp. “University of Southern Queensland has doubled down on the future, helping ensure it has the infrastructure flexibility to not only keep pace with emerging technologies, but to innovate ahead of them.”
Stephen Payne, UniSQ Associate Director, Hosting Infrastructure, discusses the collaboration in depth.
What was the tipping point that convinced you to replace the previous virtualisation platform with the Nutanix Cloud Platform?
The increasing cost pressure associated with maintaining our existing virtualisation platform. Rather than treat that as a routine renewal exercise, UniSQ used it as an opportunity to reassess its broader infrastructure strategy and consider whether the current model remained the best fit for our future needs.
Nutanix presented an alternative that would allow us to simplify the environment, improve resilience and move towards a more integrated and sustainable infrastructure platform.
The commercial arrangements negotiated through CAUDIT, combined with strong executive support and a clear migration pathway, gave us the confidence to proceed.
We had an opportunity to transform how UniSQ delivers and manages its core infrastructure while reducing risk, improving value and creating a stronger foundation for future growth.
During the migration stage, how did you ensure you hit your deadline without disrupting teaching, assessment or student services?
We approached the migration as a tightly controlled operational programme, with a clear sequence of workloads, defined change windows and close coordination between the hosting infrastructure team, application teams and Nutanix.
Our existing high availability architecture was critical. For many services, we could migrate passive nodes first, fail services across without user impact and then move the remaining nodes. This allowed much of the work to be completed during business hours while maintaining service continuity.
Nutanix Move also played an important role by simplifying workload migration and providing clear visibility of progress and exceptions. Combined with disciplined planning, strong technical ownership and rapid issue resolution, this enabled us to complete the migration within approximately four months, with no disruption to university’s operations.
What made the 52% reduction in infrastructure footprint possible and where has that shown up most clearly day to day?
The 52% reduction was achieved through workload right-sizing, platform consolidation and the move to a hyperconverged architecture.
Ahead of the migration, UniSQ reviewed virtual machine allocations and reduced areas of overprovisioning, supported by the visibility and recommendations provided through Nutanix Move.
The new architecture also allowed us to consolidate compute and storage, reduce the number of hosts and retire several standalone storage arrays. Day to day, this has resulted in a simpler environment, lower power and cooling requirements and reduced maintenance overhead.
The outcome is not only a smaller physical footprint, but a more efficient and sustainable infrastructure platform for UniSQ.
What does the shift from reactive, manual capacity management to a more proactive model look like in practice for your team now?
The shift is about giving UniSQ earlier and clearer visibility of capacity, utilisation and emerging constraints across the environment.
Rather than relying on periodic manual reviews or responding once capacity becomes an issue, the team can now identify underused resources, forecast demand and make informed decisions before performance or availability is affected.
This means less time reacting to immediate capacity pressures and more time optimising the platform, planning for the needs of UniSQ’s core systems and aligning future infrastructure investment with operational priorities.
How has the new platform changed reliability or performance for students and staff who are not on a physical campus and what benefits have they seen from using an integrated platform?
Many of UniSQ’s most critical teaching, learning, research and administrative systems are hosted and managed internally, so the resilience and availability of our infrastructure are fundamental to university operations.
The Nutanix platform has strengthened the foundation supporting these systems by improving resilience across our data centres, simplifying failover and recovery and giving the team clearer visibility of platform health. This allows us to undertake maintenance and respond to infrastructure events with greater confidence and less risk of disruption.
For students and staff, including those accessing systems or services online, the benefit is consistent and reliable access to the core systems they depend on. The platform provides a stronger and more stable foundation for UniSQ’s key services, alongside the SaaS platforms already in use.
How does the Nutanix platform specifically set you up for the next phase of development and what’s first on the agenda?
Nutanix provides UniSQ with a more scalable, resilient and integrated foundation for our future technology requirements. By simplifying the underlying architecture and improving visibility across compute, storage and workload performance, we are better positioned to respond to changing demand without continually adding cost or complexity.
Our immediate priority is to consolidate the benefits of the migration through further workload optimisation, increased automation and the continued integration of the platform into our infrastructure lifecycle and Disaster Recovery planning.
We are currently testing Nutanix Flow to introduce effective micro-segmentation into the network layer to improve our cybersecurity stance and reduce the complexity of our host-based firewall management.
The next area we want to explore is databases. UniSQ operates a significant database environment and we see an opportunity to examine how the Nutanix platform could simplify database management, improve resilience and reduce the operational overhead associated with supporting those workloads. More broadly, the platform gives us greater flexibility to support the evolving needs of teaching, research and administration while ensuring future investment remains deliberate, sustainable and aligned with UniSQ’s priorities.
