NHS belief cloud plans hampered by Trump tariff uncertainty
A plan by Essex-based Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Belief (PAH) to maneuver some capability to Nutanix cloud-based providers is blocked by uncertainty over pricing amid US president Donald Trump’s latest flurry of on-off, up-down tariffs.
PAH saved £500,000 when it migrated from VMware on end-of-life EMC VNX storage arrays to Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) a number of years in the past.
Now its plan to make use of NC2 providers from Nutanix is blocked by pricing uncertainty that doesn’t play nicely with UK public sector procurement processes.
Lately, the PAH IT staff selected a plan to exchange its present 16 Nutanix nodes with two five-node clusters, the place the second of those could be within the cloud on Nutanix NC2.
However, mentioned Jack Ciezak, infrastructure supervisor on the belief, latest turmoil round tariffs and its impact on pricing have pressured the venture to be placed on maintain.
“Due to the uncertainty with the cloud and skyrocketing prices, we stopped,” mentioned Ciezak.
“We determined we’re going to do that very slowly, which means we’re going to attend to see what is going to occur, and proper now, we determined to have it on-premise.”
NHS procurement
A part of the problem right here is NHS procurement, which suggests IT groups should consider the market, ask for the discharge of funds after which have a restricted interval throughout which they will finalise the acquisition.
Which means, if costs fluctuate wildly, issues can go flawed, mentioned Ciezak.
“When Nutanix quote, it’s primarily based on at the moment’s date and what the greenback is value,” he mentioned. “After which we now have that for 15 or 30 days, however you can’t get every part completed inside 30 days, particularly when your organisation and your government has to approve it.
“It has to go to the ICS [local integrated care system] to be authorized by them,” mentioned Ciezak. “After which this must be authorized by NHS England, they usually solely meet as soon as a month. So, earlier than you get every part completed, they are saying, ‘Oh, now the worth modified’.
“And proper now, we have no idea what is definitely occurring with the greenback.”
How will issues be resolved?
Ciezak mentioned: “I’m ready for what is going to occur within the subsequent one and a half years, when issues turn out to be steady in international phrases. We have no idea whether or not that may occur. And proper now, I do know that individuals that went to the cloud 5 years in the past, when it was comparatively new, now they’re coming again as a result of they can’t afford it.”
PAH’s unique transfer to Nutanix got here in 2019, by which era its EMC VNX exterior storage was seven years outdated and Dell help had stopped in 2018. Since then, it ditched Microsoft Hyper-V on Nutanix and moved to the hyper-converged infrastructure provider’s Acropolis hypervisor.
Ciezak mentioned he’d by no means heard of Nutanix or hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) on the time, when he spoke to Pc Weekly at Nutanix’s .Subsequent 2025 occasion within the US final week.
HCI noticed compute and storage bundled collectively in nodes that would join in grid-like trend to type clusters, usually with server and storage parts scalable independently. This was a very enticing proposition to prospects that lacked deep skillsets as they have been comparatively simply deployable and scalable.
“We went to the market to see what was on the market and on the time we by no means knew who Nutanix was,” he mentioned. “Additionally, we have been bombarded by the large distributors as quickly as I discussed the venture on LinkedIn. So, we had every part lined as much as go along with one of many massive boys, however I had a deadline of three weeks, in any other case I’d lose the cash allotted [due to procurement system constraints]. Nutanix mentioned they might ship inside three weeks, they usually did.”
And, in keeping with Ciezak, the belief saved massive by going with Nutanix and hyper-converged as an alternative of a standard storage provider. “We saved practically half 1,000,000 as a result of the opposite distributors got here in at round £1m whereas we paid round £550,000 for Nutanix,” he mentioned.
That was along with financial savings of round 75% on energy, cooling and datacentre floorspace because the EMC setup’s 30 nodes and 2x 42U of rack house was lowered to 16 Nutanix nodes. That setup now helps round 450 digital machines and 260 totally different purposes.
Initially, Nutanix was configured with the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor as a result of Ciezak was nicely versed in it, however Nutanix tried to influence him to go along with their Acropolis hypervisor (AHV).
“Nutanix supplied us AHV,” mentioned Ciezak. “I mentioned, ‘No, I don’t know who you might be. You need to do Microsoft Hyper V, as a result of that’s what I do know. I spent 11 or 12 years learning this. Perhaps in a while, once I’ve discovered your platform, I’ll contemplate AHV.’”
After that, some Microsoft Hyper-V performance turned unsupported in Nutanix. That prompted him to think about migrating to AHV, and that occurred through the Christmas interval in 2024.
The identical variety of Nutanix nodes remained – 16 cut up between two websites – however the hypervisor was migrated from Hyper-V to Nutanix’s AHV.
The important thing advantages for Ciezak have been latency, boot time and normal ease of administration. “Latency between nodes and VM visitors on Hyper-V is 15 millisecond-plus. On AHV it’s sub-millisecond,” he mentioned. “Hyper-V is a hypervisor over a hypervisor. Utilizing AHV and [Nutanix’s OS] AOS, you don’t should undergo the digital storage protocols anymore, since you straight entry the storage.
“That was the largest acquire,” added Ciezak. “In addition in Home windows, once we have been doing Home windows updates on a month-to-month foundation, let’s say server 2016 on Hyper-V, it took about seven minutes to do the boot. Now, it takes 15 seconds or much less on AHV.”
