Cranfield University

About Cranfield University

• The UK’s only exclusively post-graduate university, providing globally-recognised expertise and research facilities to support the development of future leaders in technology and management.
• It has two campus sites in the UK that employ 1,600 staff and serve 4,000 post-graduates, plus 800 PhD students and around 15,000 participants in Chartered Professional Development (CPD) programmes.

Case Study Overview

The intensive needs of staff, academics and students at Cranfield University were dependant on two ageing on-site data centre, housing traditional three-tier server architecture.

Modernisation had become crucial due to the existing infrastructure nearing the endpoint of a refresh cycle, with hardware and software licences plus support contracts approaching their renewal date.

The university was also looking to reduce the physical footprint of the data centres, with one building earmarked for redevelopment.

Another challenge to overcome was the amount of time and resource dedicated to managing the data centres. The need for daily operational oversight was dominating the task lists of the university’s IT Infrastructure Systems Team.

CDW, in partnership with Nutanix and VMware, helped design a platform that improves efficiency, performance and flexibility for thousands of staff and students by leveraging both cloud and on-premise architectures.