Essex-based Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAH) has hit a snag in its plan to transition some of its services to Nutanix cloud solutions. The problem? Uncertainty around pricing, thanks to the rollercoaster of tariffs from the U.S. under Donald Trump.
A few years back, PAH made headlines by saving £500,000 after migrating from VMware to Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure. Now, the trust wants to tap into Nutanix’s NC2 services, but pricing instability is holding things back. The PAH IT team recently decided to replace its 16 Nutanix nodes with two five-node clusters, planning to shift one of these to the cloud. But Jack Ciezak, the trust’s infrastructure manager, explained that the ongoing tariff issues have stalled their plans.
“Prices are unpredictable right now,” Ciezak said. “So we decided to take things slow and keep it on-premise for the time being.”
The NHS procurement process is complicating matters further. IT teams must thoroughly assess the market, secure funding, and finalize purchases within a tight timeframe. Price changes can throw a wrench in the works, according to Ciezak. Nutanix gives a quote based on current dollar values, with a valid period of just 15 to 30 days. But navigating NHS approval processes—first through local integrated care systems, then NHS England, which meets only monthly—means projects often don’t get done in time.
“I’m staying patient and waiting to see how things stabilize in the next year and a half,” Ciezak noted. He mentioned that organizations that jumped to the cloud early are now reconsidering due to escalating costs.
PAH initially switched to Nutanix in 2019, ditching its aging EMC VNX storage, which had lost Dell support the year prior. Ciezak hadn’t heard of Nutanix or hyper-converged infrastructure back then. When he talked about the project on LinkedIn, major vendors flooded him with offers. But Nutanix promised to deliver within three weeks, and they did.
“Our savings were substantial. While other vendors quoted around £1 million, we paid about £550,000 for Nutanix,” Ciezak said. Alongside the initial savings, PAH also slashed power, cooling, and datacenter space needs by 75%, reducing from 30 nodes to just 16. This setup currently hosts around 450 virtual machines and 260 apps.
Initially, PAH ran Nutanix on Microsoft Hyper-V since that was what Ciezak knew best. Nutanix pushed for their Acropolis hypervisor, but he hesitated. Eventually, some Hyper-V features became unsupported in Nutanix, prompting a migration to AHV during the Christmas break in 2024. Despite keeping the same number of nodes, the performance gains were clear.
“Latency on Hyper-V was over 15 milliseconds; now it’s under one,” Ciezak explained. Booting Windows has become lightning-fast too—what took seven minutes now happens in 15 seconds or less.
The changes were significant, and Ciezak sees clear advantages in ease of management and overall efficiency with AHV.