VMware NEMEA Digital Transformation Success Story of the Year

We are proud to announce that the work we’ve done with Regent’s University London was named NEMEA Digital Transformation Success Story of the Year at the VMware EMPOWER 2019 Awards on Tuesday 21 May 2019.

It’s not often that you get a ‘perfect storm’ situation where you are able to completely transform how an organisation runs their environment from top to bottom. However, this was exactly the position we found ourselves in with Regent’s University London as the majority of their on-premise hardware and storage, in both their primary and secondary data centres, was ageing.

The University had been using VMware vSphere for many years and through a consultation process, Phoenix introduced the concept of an SDDC  to not only modernise this existing data centre, but to also transform their networking and security.

The University needed to replace servers, storage and networking and therefore the components of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) had significant appeal with the IT Team at the University liking the idea of a single software-based solution for their entire data centre. Adding vSAN Enterprise and NSX Enterprise onto their data centre was the logical choice and allowed data security both via a vSAN Stretched Cluster, between campus data centres, and through the use of workload segmentation – integrated load-balancing was the cherry on the top!

The final solution comprised of an all-flash storage solution-based on Dell EMC R740XD servers acting as HCI hosts for vSAN Enterprise stretched across both data centres and additional Dell EMC servers acting as local backup hosts and management servers. VMware NSX Enterprise was chosen as the customer had a requirement to implement workload security across multiple vCenters and this tied in well with their existing security software.

The design and deployment work for the entire vSAN and NSX solution was undertaken by Phoenix’s in-house Professional Services Team which resulted in us completely transforming their legacy data centre to a full Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC) linked to public cloud and delivered significant benefit and ease of management to the University.

In summing up the project, Zubair Fakir, Chief Technology Officer at Regent’s University London, had the following to say:

“Our engagement with Phoenix has been fantastic and we’re really pleased that they recommended, designed and implemented the VMware based SDDC for us. We’re particularly pleased with how our Dell EMC HCI Stretched Cluster, based on vSAN is performing and combined with NSX provides a platform that is easy for my team to manage and delivers a great experience to staff and students alike”.