A 42% cost reduction moving off bare-metal AWS onto Nutanix Cloud Clusters

The client is a premier government-run higher education institution, relying on a growing footprint of digital infrastructure to support academic, administrative, and research workloads across its campuses. To modernize its IT operations, the institution sought to move a portion of its bare-metal AWS-hosted workloads onto a more flexible, cloud-native platform that could simplify operations, control costs, and support multi-tenant delivery of applications and databases to its various departments and units.

• The trigger for this engagement was the institution's need to control rising expenditure on bare-metal services from AWS while simplifying workload security and database operations, without having to refactor existing applications. CitiusCloud Services LLP, working alongside the Nutanix Professional Services team, was engaged as the delivery partner to design and deploy a Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS environment under a formal Statement of Work, with a stringent timeline set to realize the customer's investment quickly.

Prior to the engagement, the institution lacked a simplified, governed way to manage and secure its AWS-hosted workloads. Bare-metal AWS services offered limited flexibility and made it difficult to segregate workloads or apply consistent database management practices across departments.

• This gap created a financial risk in the form of uncontrolled and rising bare-metal expenditure, along with the operational burden of managing database workloads and day-2 operations manually — on top of the IT team's core responsibilities. Any solution also had to avoid disrupting existing applications, ruling out approaches that required refactoring.
• There was also no simplified, automated mechanism for onboarding new tenants or units, which increased the time and effort required each time a new department or application needed to be provisioned. Given the government nature of the institution and the scale of workloads involved, addressing these gaps in a timely, low-risk manner was essential.

CitiusCloud, with Nutanix Professional Services, proposed a lift-and-shift migration of the institution's workloads onto a Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) environment hosted on AWS. This approach preserved existing applications without requiring refactoring, while establishing a foundation for improved workload segregation, automation, and cost control. Phase II product functionality requirements were considered up front during design decisions to ensure the architecture could scale with future needs.

• As part of the solution, the team set up an NC2 cluster on AWS and established Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Self-Service to simplify the delivery of multi-tenant, multi-tier applications and reduce onboarding time for new units. A Migration Planning Workshop was conducted alongside a dedicated VM migration service to build the institution's confidence in addressing application considerations without needing to refactor the platform. Database management was streamlined using Nutanix Database Service (NDB), which applied predefined best practices to the database lifecycle, and a dedicated Database Migration Service supported the move of database workloads onto the new environment.
• On the architecture side, workloads were segregated with ease within the NC2 environment, and automated, self-service onboarding was put in place through NCM to support new tenants going forward. As a next step, the institution's workload security is being further strengthened using Flow Virtual Networking (FVN) and Flow Network Security (FNS).

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS formed the core of the solution, providing the institution with a Nutanix-native cloud environment running on AWS bare-metal infrastructure without requiring application refactoring.

• Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Self-Service was used to automate and simplify the delivery of multi-tenant, multi-tier applications and to reduce the time needed to onboard new departments or units. Nutanix Database Service (NDB) was deployed to bring predefined best practices to database lifecycle management, supported by a dedicated Database Migration Service to move database workloads onto the new platform. A structured Migration Planning Workshop and VM migration service were used together to plan and execute the workload migration with minimal disruption, and Flow Virtual Networking (FVN) together with Flow Network Security (FNS) are being used to further secure workloads as part of the engagement's next phase.

The engagement delivered a measurable 42% reduction in costs for the institution's workloads hosted on NC2 on AWS, compared to the previous bare-metal AWS services, directly addressing the institution's original goal of controlling expenditure.

• Beyond cost savings, the institution benefited from a simplified, more secure way of managing workloads, with automated day-2 operations that reduced onboarding time for new tenants and eased the burden on the IT team. The lift-and-shift approach meant this was achieved without any need to refactor existing applications, giving the institution confidence in the migration, while automated database lifecycle management and clearer workload segregation reduced ongoing operational overhead.