Echo360, a global provider of active learning technology to enhance educational experience before, during and after class, has rolled out a massive global cloud hosting-based infrastructure for its rich media higher education learning solutions. The new infrastructure unifies its storage architecture on Zadara’s enterprise-grade cloud storage as a service (STaaS) on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
With over 2M students in 8,000 classrooms in 600 institutions across 30 countries, Echo360 is helping to transform higher education by creating a more active and engaging learning environment. Using video to “flip” the classroom to enable distance learning or simplify class review, students learn at their own pace while class time is used for student-centered learning activities. With video’s massive storage requirements, Echo360 wanted an option that offered excellent performance.
Already deployed on AWS Direct Connect locations serving the U.S. West, U.S. East, Europe, and Australia regions, Echo360 has standardized on Zadara’s Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) on AWS, using nearly 100TB of capacity.
AWS compute resources
Zadara’s VPSA’s use AWS Direct Connect to connect customers to AWS compute resources in their respective location via high-speed fiber lines. Drives are private and not shared with anyone else, so Zadara users can obtain single-tenant performance at multitenant prices. Expansion to more drives, or switching from disks to SSDs, would be as simple as clicking a button on the dedicated online management interface provided to each customer.
At any time, Zadara users can also eliminate drives, adjust controller performance, and fine tune other storage needs on the fly – allowing agility and control in a flexible, pay-as-you-go model. Zadara customers pay only for the storage they consume, without long-term commitments or up-front fees, and can add or decrease storage requirements at any time.
Cloud hosting providers
By standardizing its entire global infrastructure on AWS for compute, and Zadara’s VPSA for cloud storage as a service, Echo360 avoids the management of multiple cloud hosting provider contracts, SLAs and support staffs. Instead it removes both itself and its college customers from the business of managing video storage on site – so each can focus on teaching and learning activities.
“Echo360 provides a mission critical active learning platform for our higher education clients so we must utilize the most reliable cloud architecture possible,” said Tony Abate, chief operating officer of Echo360. “We found it all with Zadara – a partner who can support our growth from any of ten global regions worldwide, as well as flexible, reliable, and geographically redundant, storage solutions that safeguard our clients’ most sensitive information.
