Ty Peavey is a proud man – not proud as in ‘arrogant’, but he can rightly pat himself on the back about having found a smart solution when the conundrum that was Broadcom’s 2022 acquisition of VMware caused chaos everywhere in enterprise IT.
Product end-of-support announcements and licensing price hikes led to a sprint to adapt to maintain orderly operations. “One of the biggest achievements of my career was to pivot away early and get VMware off my racks,” he says.
As the director of infrastructure services for central IT at US Ivy League university Dartmouth College, Peavey was in the crossfire when it came to the Broadcom-VMware case, surely one of the oddest and most challenging events in recent history for people in roles such as his.
Dartmouth, founded in 1769, home to more than 4,000 undergraduates and intimately linked to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and many medical and scientific breakthroughs, is one of the most storied academic institutions in the world.
Working for such a prestigious college, stuffed full of bright, analytical people, Peavey knows the pressure is always on to be making the right calls. Switching focus from VMware to up Dartmouth’s investment with Nutanix’s hypervisor and hyperconvergence stack proved to be just one of them.
Start delayed
Looking back on his career, Peavey says that he “was kind of a late bloomer” who had “bounced around” various speculations as to where his career might head before concluding that IT was the right path.
“I fell into IT at a large manufacturing company and quickly gravitated to infrastructure,” he says, recalling taking a night-school degree while raising a young family. There followed a stint at the storage behemoth EMC before working for a small clinical trials company. That slightly circuitous route eventually led to Dartmouth, idyllically located amid bucolic New Hampshire valleys in the north-east US.
Infrastructure is sometimes depicted as the keep-the-lights-on aspect of IT management, but Peavey likes it and it has been the centrepoint of his career. “It’s been fluid and changing but I’ve stuck with infrastructure the whole time,” he says.
He credits his cultural outlook in part to the influence of departing Dartmouth CIO Mitch Davis who, he says, “inspired me to have an open culture of working, not too heavy, top-down and willing to take some risks. It’s emphasised in higher education [where] IT is very decentralised. You have a lot of independent working teams; DevOps has become a very popular term and it’s no different here in Dartmouth. We try to empower application owners, give them more control in the space they work.”
“One of the biggest achievements of my career was to pivot away early and get VMware off my racks”
Ty Peavey, Dartmouth College
That enablement must be underpinned with robust architecture though, to support Dartmouth’s Oracle ERP, data warehousing, campus services and security, including surveillance and emergency services.
Dartmouth has a large stake in the AWS cloud and a lesser one in Microsoft Azure as well as on-premise datacentres and some co-location, plus a total of about 1,000 virtual machines (VMs) split equally between Windows and Linux. It runs 400-500 Kubernetes containers on Nutanix and is about 98% virtualised.
That dependence on hyperconvergence also means that it has no investment in SAN or Fibre Channel. The DegreeWorks cloud service for students and advisors to monitor progress is a key element, as is Rubrik for data security and recovery.
Not just cloud
So far, so modern and legacy three-tier architecture has been jettisoned, but Peavey says Dartmouth is not wedded to cloud or any individual IT architecture.
“We are cloud opportunists as opposed to cloud-only,” he states. “We don’t have a mandate to move everything to the cloud. It’s really not one way or the other, it’s what works best. We’re conservative and open. We try to provide very solid platforms and services that DevOps teams can plug into.”
That suits Dartmouth’s variegated character where projects can be highly varied in terms of scale and requirements. And, of course, Peavey says, there are budget pressures familiar to all US colleges today.
“We have a medical school and their research is huge, and we need to provide VMs, containers, storage to anyone trying to do healthcare research. Or it can be a traditional HR or finance team working with ERPs, so we have all sorts of characters we work with.
“The climate is very sensitive to funding and Dartmouth is no more insulated from those topics than any university. Where you run platforms as a service for various teams, funding is a big concern [and] when funding is less, challenges become difficult. It’s very impactful on conversations around staffing: you never have enough staff, and it really hits the bottom line in costs of covering software and hardware renewals.”
Fame and blame
Yet another challenge is the fame of Dartmouth. There is, Peavey says, “a particular status and notoriety…everyone recognises the name, and we try to be a leader”.
“What sets Dartmouth and the Ivy League apart is really the faculty,” he adds. “When you’re selecting [a college as a student], you want to go to a university where you’re going to be taught by a world-renowned faculty, and we have some of the best professors and faculties in the world.
“It’s a very high bar. We have a lot of interesting ideas and projects, and we really work hard to accommodate those through a non-traditional infrastructure. Some of these faculties will see right through mediocre performance. We put them in touch with vendors: we facilitate those conversations then step out of the way. Other times it’s flat-out ‘We want a big Linux VM to do heavy-duty work’.”
That facilitative relationship extends to suppliers too, where Peavey says the aim is to be “collegiate, not transactional”, adding: “There are so many suppliers, and it can be quite transactional. We work with suppliers including Nutanix, Juniper, HAProxy and it’s really reciprocal. It’s selling and buying products, but the other thing is we recognise the value of added services: being able to talk to back-end product engineers and so on. It’s really important to foster a reciprocal relationship between both [sides] so we do a lot of lunches.
“One of the things I try to insist on is taking suppliers to the student dining hall. I treat them to lunch, and I particularly love it if it’s September and the students are excited and there’s electricity in the air. That’s not to mention coming to New England in the fall [when autumn leaves put on a famous arboreal display], so they remember this isn’t a large corporation with a bunch of faceless executives. We’re here about teaching and learning, and that’s at the heart of everything we do.”
Keeping it simple
While Peavey is very keen on these partner relationships, he is also keen to control supplier sprawl. “I love ‘one throat to choke’,” he says, and avoiding having suppliers pointing fingers at each other when things go wrong. “It’s a lot easier to build relationships with one vendor rather than two.”
He’s also an enthusiast for talking to peers at other schools on an annual basis via a Zoom call. Similarly, he’s keen to encourage staff to have broad remits. “Whenever you have one person dedicated to one thing, that’s an incredibly expensive resource. I much prefer a stack [capability] where my staff can be more general, and I can transition people around.”
All in all, it’s a busy schedule with plenty to work on – and hopefully not another Broadcom-style spanner in the works coming anytime soon.
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