Echo360 leverages Zadara’s Enterprise Storage as a Service

“Video-centric solutions such as Echo360 are among the most challenging to deploy at massive scale”

“Echo360 provides a mission critical active learning platform for our higher education clients so we must utilise 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. With Zadara, we can continue to provide universities and colleges with exceptional learning solutions that let instructors teach more effectively, students learn anywhere, anytime, and let administrators do more, reach more, and save more.”

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-centred learning activities. With video’s massive storage requirements, Echo360 wanted an option that offered excellent performance.
By standardising its entire global infrastructure on AWS for compute, and Zadara’s VPSA for enterprise Storage As a Service, Echo360 avoids the management of multiple cloud 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. Institutions rely on Echo360 to automatically capture and archive campus lectures and other digital learning resources, and stream or download this learning content to online students anywhere. With Zadara behind their infrastructure, these institutions have an ultra-reliable way to store their valuable instructional media and videos while saving both customer and internal costs and complexity. As higher education moves more of its applications to hosted solutions as part of business continuity plans, Zadara’s snapshots provide a point-in-time backup of an institution’s videos, allowing for rapid recovery in the event of an outage.

“More enterprises like Echo360 are coming to AWS with intensive video related applications that require SAN- and NAS-like capabilities and we are delighted that, along with Zadara Storage, we can help serve them,” said Terry Wise, Director of Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “The AWS Cloud gives Echo360 and others the ability to do business around the globe with consistent practices, while knowing that even its most demanding storage needs can be met in an elastic, pay as you go model.”

Zadara’s Virtual Private Storage Arrays use AWS Direct Connect to connect customers to AWS compute resources in their respective location via high-speed fibre 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, is 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.
“Video-centric solutions such as Echo360 are among the most challenging to deploy at massive scale,” said Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage. “Because Zadara provides elasticity and enterprise grade features with a global foot print, we can meet the key requirements of the Echo360 critical storage architecture. We’re thrilled to help Echo360 dramatically scale its business as well as to optimise its costs and margins simply by leveraging our SAN- and NAS-like capabilities on AWS.”