Our challenging cyberthreat environment has enterprises searching for new data protection, privacy solutions and best practices by their cloud providers. OVHcloud’s new Advance-6 Bare Metal Servers are equipped with 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors (formerly code-named “Ice Lake”) and Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX). These unique technologies offer increased performance and leverage Confidential Computing for data privacy, regulatory compliance and stronger data protection.

Read this article to learn more about Confidential Computing and how you can benefit from these capabilities.

At the core of modern business transformation

As the world becomes more connected, businesses are experiencing a rise in data collection, use and storage. To process this data, new solutions such as cloud and analytics are emerging and transforming business operations. But these changes can also bring increased risk if security is not addressed.

We believe security, privacy and compliance must work alongside transformation, so we built our Advance-6 Bare Metal Servers using Intel® SGX – because it delivers Confidential Computing and increased data protection for our customers. Disk and network encryption can protect data while it is stored or in-transit, but traditionally, data is vulnerable while it is actively in-use inside the CPU and memory. Intel SGX creates hardware-protected “enclaves” designed to shield data and code from unauthorized parties or software while it is in-use. Data and code inside an enclave are not accessible by the cloud administrators or software stack, so your cloud host cannot access your organization’s private data, helping to comply with requirements imposed by GDPR and other regulations.

Rising to the security challenge with Confidential Computing

Enterprise data faces an increased threat from hackers, unauthorized third parties and malicious insiders, who often leverage exploits in other applications, or privilege escalations in the OS and hypervisor layers. And as software security improves, attackers have started moving down the stack to identify new vulnerabilities. This puts business-confidential or regulated data at risk. A data breech can result in severe monetary and reputational damage.

All of this means that perimeter defences are no longer enough. What is needed is a multi-layered defence strategy that makes it infeasible to execute a successful attack. Confidential Computing technology has become crucial for such strategies, as it uses a hardware-based approach to isolate data within a trusted enclave and encrypt it in memory. This protects data from vulnerabilities in the OS and hypervisor layers and ensures even users with full access permissions cannot decipher the data without a key.

Confidential Computing is “Compliance Computing”

Europe is setting the pace for the world in privacy and data protection, and organizations that handle personal or regulated data need to take steps to minimize risk of a breech or violation. That means deploying industry best practices and the latest privacy-preserving technology to maintain data security, sovereignty, and control.

Confidential Computing with Intel SGX can be a key part of a compliance regimen and help reduce regulatory risk. Not even a cloud provider like OVHcloud can access the data protected inside an enclave. In addition, OVHcloud offers attestation services so customers can receive cryptographic verification that their workloads are running on genuine Intel SGX hardware, the microcode is up-to-date and the software load is exactly what is expected. Attestation helps assure our customers their data is protected and compliant.

A new level of performance, confidence and security

The Advance-6 Bare Metal Server offers enhanced performance, while enabling solutions to be deployed quickly and at scale. It benefits from PCIe Gen4 and data centre grade NVMe disks, which boost bandwidth, and at the same time, OVHcloud Link Aggregation feature enables the two servers’ physical network links to be aggregated for optimal network speeds.

Advance-6 Servers also contain 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, which improve per-core performance with Intel® 10nm processes. They also contain Intel® SGX – the technology that drives Confidential Computing. Intel® SGX is built-in at the CPU level and enables data to be isolated inside trusted encrypted enclaves.

Intel® SGX also provides:

• Protection against attacks even if the OS/drivers/BIOS/VMM/SMM are compromised
• Increased protection for secrets (data/keys/passwords) even when the attacker has full control of the platform
• Defence against attacks such as memory bus snooping, memory tampering and ‘cold boot’ attacks against the RAM

Examples of Confidential Computing

Here are some examples within machine learning and cryptography:

Secure Multi-Party Compute

Organizations often need to collaborate but sharing data is prohibited due to confidentiality or regulation. Secure Multi-Party Compute is a privacy-preserving technique that enables multiple parties to pool their data and yield more accurate results, whilst keeping each party’s data private from the others. All parties can use the attestation capabilities to verify that their “data clean room” is operating properly and the software is what they expect. Intel SGX is being used today in multi-party medical research and financial fraud detection use cases.

Federated Learning

Federated Learning is a Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) method that deploys algorithms to decentralised devices or sites in order to create pooled analysis from data too large or sensitive to move to a common data clean room. In this use case, the algorithm is protected in an Intel SGX enclave while it conducts its analysis. After removing any private information, the results are related to a central node, combined with results from other nodes, and new weights or parameters are pushed to the remote models. This ensures sensitive data is not exposed to threats and helps organizations to build a more accurate model.

Key Management

Key Management is the practice of managing encryption keys, whether that’s generating and storing keys, or replacing keys for users. A common approach is to keep keys separate from data, often with Hardware Security Modules (HSM) – physical hardware designed purely for protecting and managing encryption keys and performing other authentication and encryption functions.

Mitigating data security and compliance risks is a big challenge with high stakes. OVHcloud’s new Advance-6 Bare Metal Servers with Intel SGX can help you rise to that challenge with hardware-based protections that defend your data from threats and help keep your organization compliant with privacy regulations.

Intel® SGX is available with Advance-1, Advance-2 and Advance-6 Bare Metal Servers.

And, while public sector data, financial records, customer information and confidential business reports were previously stored in secure facilities where physical access was restricted and closely monitored, in the digital age, vast amounts of data are continuously on the move.

These changes have seen the evolution of a security industry focused on ensuring confidential information is secure and can only be accessed by the people and systems authorised to do so.

Businesses are also realising and tapping into the value of the data they hold, with high-performance data processing driving whole new business models. With business data becoming more and more critical to operations, suddenly losing access to it would make it extremely difficult for many businesses to continue their activities.

The security challenges of high-performance workloads

High-performance computing is growing all the time, with the amount of data being extracted, transferred and stored increasing exponentially.

In addition to the sheer volume of data, high-performance workloads are complex, requiring a large number of nodes, distributed systems, and optimised configurations, which are tuned and tested for the specific business.

They must also deal with the added complexity that comes when data includes health records or financial information over different geographic regions, where local laws restrict the movement of certain types of information.

Add into the mix that these capabilities are increasingly provided in the cloud, and there are a number of extra considerations.

An expanded attack surface

With data being transferred to and from the cloud, as well as being processed and stored beyond the confines of organisation’s own IT infrastructure, there are more channels that malicious actors could use to intercept, disrupt or steal data.

Cloud providers’ data centres, which contain server hardware, network switches and IT tools, further expand this attack surface.

OVHcloud, for example, provides millions of public IP addresses across five continents and faces a constant battle to thwart attacks from hackers and criminal organisations hoping to profit from data theft, fraud and compromised systems.

This larger attack surface means cloud-based data processing is more attractive to malicious individuals or groups conducting distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), where they attempt to overload an application or network with too much information.

High-performance workloads require high availability and lots of compute power by definition, so can be particularly impacted by these types of attacks. Not only can DDoS attacked overwhelm servers, they can also affect the general speed of traffic on the network — another issue that could particularly impact high-performance workloads.

Protecting high-performance workloads

Malicious actors present a constant threat to customer data, and so cloud providers of high-performance capabilities must go above and beyond when it comes to protecting the information on their networks.

They need to follow security best practice, use the most reliable and tested technology, and abide by regulations set out by governments and regulators.

Decentralising the computing and running high-performance workloads on numerous servers at the same time, means a successful attack on a server is less likely to affect the high-performance environment.

It’s also important for organisations to put disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities in place, so mission-critical workloads can continue to safely and securely operate even if a security issue occurs.

Being aware of the combined security implications of high-performance workloads and the cloud, means organisations can plan the right approach and select the cloud provider that will best manage their risks.

AI, for example, is being used in applications that recognise human emotions or mimic human conversation. Some multinationals, meanwhile, are developing applications to automate back-office processes, power intelligent chatbots for customer service, or that can scan millions of information-heavy documents to find insights.

What unites these technologies is that they involve large amounts of data that must be rapidly and reliably processed. This has created an increased need for businesses to have access to high-performance workload capabilities.

One piece of research suggests the high-performance computing market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 5.5 per cent between 2020 and 2025 to reach $49.4 billion.

However, many organisations struggle to overcome resourcing issues that can either prevent these capabilities being put in place or stop companies from exploiting them to their full potential.

The resource question

One issue is around cost. The hardware, software and networks aren’t the standard kit being used for other business operations, but specialist products that come with a premium price tag.

In addition, many organisations lack the time to get these capabilities up and running. This is particularly true when you consider the additional burden placed on IT departments due to the Covid-19 pandemic, during which they’ve had to support an increase in remote working and manage the increased risk associated with shadow IT.

High-performance workloads are complex, requiring a large number of nodes, distributed systems and data. While this may all sound quite daunting, it doesn’t have to be — particularly with the right approach and service provider.

To gain high-performance capabilities, businesses don’t have to go all-in — they can start small, both in terms of cost and capabilities, before expanding their usage.

How cloud helps out

One major reason for this is the fact that high-performance capabilities can now be accessed via the cloud. There is no need to invest in expensive and complicated on-premises equipment — this will all be provided by the service provider. No additional space needs to be found and there is no need to have IT staff who are dedicated to the upkeep of the infrastructure.

Service providers will also be able to provide the networking capabilities and tools needed to keep the high-performance capabilities — which are often business critical — available at all times and can support large amounts of data securely.

Even better, businesses only need to pay for the capabilities they use — there is no need to pay for unused capacity on the off chance it could be needed in the future. A business can experiment with small implementations before deciding whether they want to up their capabilities, meaning little money is wasted and there is minimal risk.

A service provider with the answers

In addition to the benefits that cloud offers, service providers can also address other resource challenges around high-performance workloads.

When it comes to pricing, transparency is key. It’s a particularly big advantage for companies that have limited budgets as they are able to have predictable costs, even if they have an unexpected spike in traffic or need to restore a large backup.

Another advantage is having the ability to take on dedicated high-performance servers individually, which they can build on to eventually create a cluster, or clusters. This flexibility to start small really helps businesses dip their toe in the water with high-performance workloads, before embarking on anything more ambitious.

This makes it easy for organisations to gain the capacity they need — so business requirements are fully met without resources being wasted or overcommitted. OVHcloud, for example, offers several storage configuration options so organisations can choose the right disk configuration based on their needs.

Conclusion

With the ability of cloud technology to support data-intensive workloads, and service providers that address the other resource issues, there is no need for businesses to think high-performance capabilities aren’t a realistic option.

They can start playing with small stakes before going big — all with minimal risk. If the new capabilities fulfil the business need, they can be retained or scaled up. And if capabilities fail to meet business needs, businesses can stop using the services without significant financial cost.

In this way, your business can enjoy the benefits of high-performance workloads without putting a strain on resources, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

According to IDC, more than 55 billion devices, including industrial IoT applications and sensors, will generate more than 73ZB of data by 2025, up from 18ZB in 2019. The analyst firm also expects worldwide storage capacity to increase from 6.8ZB in 2020 to 8.9ZB by 2024.

With the volume of data growing exponentially and technologies improving quickly to handle that growth, the latest and most cutting-edge computing hardware doesn’t come cheap. As a result, organisations need to evolve their procurement practices to better serve customers, improve their bottom line and remain competitive.

Traditionally, when an organisation is planning an update to its IT infrastructure, it sets a budget and finds the solution to fulfil its technical requirements at the right price. Technology upgrades, meanwhile, are often seen as an opportunity to cut costs rather than enhance profitability.

By focusing on the pure dollar amount of a project, organisations are missing the potential competitive advantage that could be gained by employing high-performance capabilities in to rapidly transform raw data into business insights.

Can you afford to?

Cloud technology is well established but high-performance capabilities add a whole new dimension by creating a wave of opportunity for innovation, especially around workloads that contain enormous amounts of data and employ machine learning, pattern recognition and AI.

High-performance systems are built from components that are orders of magnitude faster than standard technologies and can provide a level of performance that until recently was only available to large institutions and government departments with deep pockets.

However, over the past few years, advances in technology have resulted in high-performance capabilities becoming more accessible than ever before, creating an opportunity for organisations that are able to break from the traditional IT procurement mindset.

Can you afford not to?

Instead of looking at IT plans and considering the technologies required to keep doing the same thing, innovative organisations are imagining how much more competitive, efficient and profitable they could be if they were able to run high-performance workloads to create a performance gap between themselves and the competition.

High-performance products sell at a premium compared to standard cloud infrastructures but the additional costs can be recouped with improved efficiencies, scalability and competitiveness.

The next wave of disruptors will use high-performance capabilities to rapidly process, organise and analyse their data to create innovative products, fight off competition and create completely new markets.

According to a recent study by Mordor Intelligence the value of the global high-performance computing industry will increase from $24 billion in 2020 to over $42 billion by 2026.

High-performance systems are quickly becoming the standard for big data workloads, meaning that any organisation wanting to remain competitive in this area will have to determine how high-performance workloads can be integrated into its infrastructure.

Why high-performance capabilities make sense

Choosing to implement high-performance capabilities is a complex task that requires technical expertise and a solid business plan.

Organisations need to identify the most suitable processor, bandwidth and memory for their workloads. Do they have the right security, will their systems be interoperable, and do they really know exactly how much the whole thing will cost?

Some companies may find it counterintuitive to be spending vast sums of money on cloud-based high-performance capabilities when a regular cloud infrastructure could do a similar job but slower. If their workloads are not time critical then maybe spending on premium technology can’t and shouldn’t be justified.  But if workloads are time critical, if you deal in real time data, if AI and machine-learning systems are required to analyse and manipulate data to generate critical information, a change of mindset is all you need to access the high-performance capabilities your business needs.

La ZLAN, c’est quoi ?

La ZLAN est une compétition e-sport francophone des plus singulières au monde. Par son aspect « émission TV », elle bénéficie de moyens dignes des plus grosses productions e-sport. Par son côté fun et décalé, elle a la particularité d’être multi-gaming sur des jeux, compétitifs ou non, mais dont les formats ont été adaptés par les équipes. Le tout en fait un événement agréable, à la fois pour les joueurs, les téléspectateurs et les équipes. C’est également l’un des événements e-sport les plus importants en France : il regroupe chaque année des streamers extrêmement connus et des joueurs (professionnels ou amateurs) qui s’affrontent pour tenter de gagner le cash prize de 50 000€ !

La première édition a eu lieu en 2019. On est maintenant à la troisième et, depuis le début, on attire plusieurs millions de viewers et on espère que ça va continuer, en tout cas on fait tout pour !

Les particularités de la ZLAN versus une LAN classique

La ZLAN est une LAN de taille moyenne construite autour de 200 participants choisis à la fois parmi les streamers les plus connus et tirés au sort parmi plusieurs milliers d’inscrits. Tout est adapté au format TV : la décoration, le placement des joueurs, les conditions de jeu, pas de détritus, de papiers, de câbles qui trainent partout. La ZLAN est l’inverse même de l’ancienne LAN de garage.

Le premier défi concerne les jeux choisis eux-mêmes. Le principe même de la ZLAN est de sélectionner des jeux non destinés à la compétition e-sport ou peu connus. Les équipes techniques doivent donc, d’une part, configurer les serveurs dédiés pour accueillir des centaines de joueurs et, d’autre part, adapter les outils de tournois « classiques » pour sortir les résultats et statistiques des matchs.

La compétition repose sur des fondamentaux IT majeurs :

• Une équipe technique expérimentée capable de répondre aux moindres demandes et problèmes (il y en a toujours) rapidement
• Un réseau rapide, fiable et capable de résister à des attaques DDoS
• Des serveurs dédiés fiables capables de recevoir les serveurs de jeux

Des équipes techniques expérimentées, proactives et réactives

Le réel défi technique des équipes de ZQSD Productions est de gérer le réseau pour plus de 500 personnes (joueurs, régie, presse, visiteurs) qui doivent d’abord télécharger chacun 80 GB de jeu à moins de 30 minutes de l’installation, puis maintenir des latences très faibles de jeu.

S’ajoutent à cela les attaques DDoS à répétition sur les événements e-sport. Avec plusieurs ingénieurs réseaux et sécurité, nous mettons en place des réseaux locaux comprenant plus de 60 switchs, le cœur de réseau, le routage et les protections anti-DDoS en moins d’une journée.

Plusieurs outils nécessaires ont été développés tout au long de la ZLAN :

• Un serveur de cache ultra-puissant permettant à plusieurs utilisateurs qui téléchargent un même fichier sur Internet de le télécharger en réalité en local, et donc beaucoup plus vite
• Un RTMP.ME qui permet la multi-diffusion des flux sur les plateformes externes
• Des outils internes de production destinés à l’automatisation des différents softwares et hardwares
• Des outils de liaison Jeu <> Production destinés au transfert automatique de données des jeux vers le broadcast
• Des outils de liaison Spectateurs <> Production destinés au transfert de données spectateurs (sondages, questions, interactions, retours injectés automatiquement en broadcast)
• Des outils de liaison Joueurs/Stats <> Production destinés au transfert de données joueurs (remontées capteurs, résultats, historique injectés automatiquement en broadcast)
• Les sites Internet et Intranet

Une architecture réseau fiable et capable de délivrer la meilleure expérience de jeu

Mettre en place un réseau pour une LAN d’une centaine de joueurs semble facile : quelques switchs, des câbles réseau… En réalité, la ZLAN est une LAN avec plus de 80 streams sortants, 11 jeux complètement différents, 200 joueurs qui nécessitent une connexion parfaite avec une latence minimale, et surtout une protection contre les potentielles attaques DDoS qui se multiplient sur ce genre d’évènement depuis quelques années.

En 2021, chaque joueur a de fortes demandes en réseau pour consulter et interagir sur les réseaux sociaux, ouvrir plusieurs streams, parler sur Discord, Skype, Slack et autres. Tout le monde veut télécharger tous les jeux en moins d’une minute, car certains sont habitués à avoir jusqu’à 1 Gbps chez eux facilement grâce à la fibre, sans oublier les téléphones qui ont besoin d’un Wifi pour les usages du quotidien (quand la 4G ne fonctionne pas bien pour autant de personnes sur le lieu de l’événement).

Il est difficile de se rendre compte que bénéficier d’une telle connexion dans une salle est une chose rare en France. Une salle de plusieurs milliers de m² nécessite des interconnexions et rocades sur des centaines de mètres et plusieurs étages. Le matériel de la salle a pu être posé par un opérateur il y a 5 ans et plus personne ne maîtrise l’environnement (ça fonctionne et c’est déjà bien !). Rajoutez les joueurs et les usages et vous avez un aperçu des défis techniques pour organiser une LAN de cette ampleur aujourd’hui.

Des serveurs dédiés optimisés pour le Gaming, stables et performants

Pour la compétition cette année, nous avions besoin de beaucoup de puissance processeur et mémoire sur nos serveurs. Avec Valheim et Trackmania, nous avions besoin d’un minimum de 128 serveurs de jeu à mettre en place en simultané pour les phases de poule. Nous avons estimé nos besoins à environ 96 cœurs cadencés à 4 GHz ainsi que 500 Go de RAM. Grâce à notre expérience, au vu des jeux et compte tenu de la manière dont sont codés les différents serveurs, la vitesse du processeur est le plus important. Nous nous sommes naturellement tournés vers OVHcloud et leur gamme Game pour répondre à nos besoins de puissance. Nous avons d’ailleurs pu tester en exclusivité 16 serveurs Game-1 basés sur les processeurs AMD Ryzen 5 5600X.

Nos critères de sélection :

• Des années d’expérience avec OVHcloud, un contact commercial rapide et efficace
• Une stabilité à toute épreuve : nous n’avons jamais eu aucun souci de disponibilité sur tous nos événements !
• La mise à disposition rapide des serveurs, critère essentiel pour nous qui travaillons à flux tendu et sur des deadlines évènementielles e-sport très courtes
• La position géographique en France, proche de notre LAN, avec une bande passante largement suffisante qui n’implique pas de surcoût, ce qu’on demande en réalité 😉
• « Last but not least » malgré tous ces critères : un prix pas délirant

Pour aller plus loin dans le monde du Gaming et du e-sport

Ces dernières années, les attaques DDoS à répétition se multiplient sur les évènements e-sport. La maîtrise parfaite des subtilités et des besoins des jeux est essentielle. Les attaques DDoS du monde Gaming sont bien différentes des attaques DDoS qu’on peut retrouver sur un site Internet classique.

Utiliser des serveurs distants implique qu’ils doivent être tout aussi protégés que le réseau LAN. Or, l’anti-DDoS Game OVHcloud est aujourd’hui l’un des seuls à proposer un anti-DDoS réellement efficace pour les jeux, testé et éprouvé lors de plusieurs Trackmania Cup, avec plus de 6 000 joueurs en simultané !

L’anti-DDoS Game est, par ailleurs, intégré par défaut sur l’ensemble de la gamme de serveurs dédiés Game. Il a été développé entièrement pour et par les équipes d’OVHcloud et bénéficie d’une communauté importante d’utilisateurs.

Les équipes OVHcloud ont été ravies d’accompagner une nouvelle fois cette saison e-sport au travers des événements organisés par ZQSD Productions.

Retrouvez la gamme de serveurs dédiés Game basés sur les processeurs AMD Ryzen architecture Zen 3 sur notre site web.

What is ZLAN?

ZLAN is a gaming event based in France, and is one of the world’s most unique e-sports competitions. With its TV-show format, its production quality matches some of the biggest e-sports productions across the globe. The event has a quirky, off-the-wall vibe, and stands out because it streams multiple competitive and non-competitive games at once. The formats have also been adapted by the teams. All this makes it a fun competition for players, viewers and teams. It is also one of the most high-profile e-sports events in France. Every year, it brings together the most well-known streamers and players (professionals and amateurs) who compete to win the €50,000 cash prize.

The first edition took place in 2019. We have now held its third edition — and since the beginning, we have attracted several million viewers. We hope that it will continue to grow in popularity, and we will always keep up the same level of entertainment.

The difference between ZLAN versus a standard LAN

ZLAN is a medium-sized LAN event built around 200 participants. They are selected from among the most well-known streamers, and chosen by several thousand subscribers. Everything is adapted to the TV format: the decoration, the placement of players, the conditions of play, and rules against litter, paper, and cables lying around. ZLAN is the opposite of the LAN parties that became popular from around the early 2000s.

The first challenge involves choosing the games for the event. The goal of ZLAN is to select games that are not intended for e-sports competition, and games that are not very well-known. This means that on the one hand, the technical teams must configure dedicated servers to host hundreds of players. On the other hand, they must also adapt standard tournament tools to get the match results and statistics.

The competition is based on the most fundamental IT requirements:

• An experienced technical team that can quickly resolve even the smallest requests and problems (there always are).
• A fast, reliable network that can withstand DDoS attacks.
• Reliable dedicated servers that can host game servers.

Experienced, proactive and reactive technical teams

The real technical challenge for ZQSD Productions teams is managing the network for more than 500 people (players, management, press, visitors) who must first download 80GB of game each, within 30 minutes of installation — then maintain minimal latency for the games.

In addition to this, e-sports events get hit repeatedly by DDoS attacks. With several network and security engineers, we set up local networks that include more than 60 switches, the network core, routing and anti-DDoS protection in less than a day.

Several necessary tools have been developed throughout the ZLAN:

• An ultra powerful cache server that enables multiple users who download the same file on the internet to actually download it locally, with optimal speed.
• An RTMP.ME that enables multiple broadcasting of feeds on external platforms.
• In-house production tools for automating various types of hardware and software.
• Game <> Production linking tools for automatic data transfer from games to broadcast.
• Spectator <> Production liaison tools for transferring spectator data (surveys, questions, interactions, feedback automatically injected into the broadcast).
• Player/Stats <> Production linking tools for transferring player data (sensor feeds, results, logs automatically injected into the broadcast).
• Internet and intranet sites.

A reliable network architecture that delivers an optimal gaming experience

Setting up a network for a LAN of about 100 players may seem easy, as it just involves connecting some switches, network cables, and other bits of hardware. In reality, ZLAN is a LAN with more than 80 streams, 11 completely different games, 200 players that require a perfect connection with minimal latency — and above all, protection against the growing number of DDoS attacks that have targeted e-sports events in recent years.

In 2021, every player had high demands in terms of network requests to view and interact on social networks, opening multiple streams, and chatting on Discord, Skype, Slack and more. Everyone wants to download all the games in less than a minute, as some are used to having up to 1Gbps at home easily with a fibre connection. We also need to take into account that the phones that need Wi-Fi for everyday use (when 4G connection is weak for many people at the event venue).

It is hard to understand that having this level connection in a room is a rare thing in France. A room of several thousand m² requires interconnections and backbone cabling that covers hundreds of metres, and several floors. The room’s equipment was installed by an operator 5 years ago, and no-one has any control over the environment (it works and it’s already good!). Once you take into account the players and the resource usage, you get an idea of the technical challenges we face organising a LAN of this scale today.

Stable, high-performance dedicated servers optimised for gaming

For this year’s competition, we needed a lot of CPU and memory power on our servers. With Valheim and Trackmania, we needed a minimum of 128 game servers to be set up simultaneously for the knockout rounds. We estimated our requirements at about 96 cores with 4GHz and 500GB RAM. With our experience in terms of video games and the way the various servers are coded, we know that processor speed is the most important factor. Naturally, we opted for OVHcloud and their Game range to meet our power needs. We were also able to test 16 Game-1 servers exclusively, based on AMD Ryzen 5600X processors.

Our selection criteria:

• Years of experience with OVHcloud, with a quick and efficient sales contact.
• Stability under resource-intensive conditions — throughout all of our events, we have never had any availability issues!
• Optimal server allocation, which is an essential factor for us as we work to very short deadlines for e-sports events.
• The geographical position in France, close to our LAN event, with ample bandwidth that does not incur additional costs. This is exactly what we were looking for.
• Last but not least, all of our criteria were met at a reasonable price.

Going further in the world of gaming and e-sports

In recent years, repeated DDoS attacks have ramped up on e-sports events, which means that an in-depth understanding of subtleties and requirements linked to online gaming is vital. DDoS attacks in the gaming world are very different from DDoS attacks that target a standard website.

Since we use remote servers, they must be just as protected as the LAN. However, the OVHcloud anti-DDoS Game protection is now one of the only anti-DDoS solutions to offer a seamless gaming experience. It has been tested during several Trackmania Cup competitions, with over 6,000 players playing simultaneously.

Anti-DDoS Game is also included by default on all Game dedicated servers. It has been developed entirely for and by OVHcloud teams, and has a wide community of users.

The OVHcloud teams have been honoured to support this e-sports season once again, with the events organised by ZQSD Productions.

On our website, you will find the range of Game dedicated servers based on AMD Ryzen Zen 3 architecture processors.

Advance (new generation)

The Advance range (new generation) is aimed at small to medium-sized enterprises looking for performance, optimisation and control. It meets the requirements of a range of use cases for hosting, computing, storage, containerisation and virtualisation.

We offer seven new Advance servers with 6, 8, 12, 16 or 24 cores. They offer a wide choice of disk options with different technologies: HDD, SSD, SAS, SATA, NVMe, and hardware RAID options. These new machines replace the previous Advance and Infrastructure ranges. They also meet our customers’ new needs, with increased performance.

On our website, the legacy Advance and Infrastructure servers have been replaced by the new generation. This new generation combines the latest technologies from our ecosystem:

• Intel Xeon E (Rocket Lake)
• AMD Epyc 3^rd generation (Milan)
• AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
• PCIe Gen4 technology and DDR4 memory

We took our customer feedback on board, and integrated technologies previously reserved for the Infrastructure range into the new Advance range. From the ADV-2 server upwards, our Advance range (new generation) is equipped with OVHcloud Link Aggregation (OLA) technology and high-speed connectivity. You also get up to 5Gbit/s on the public network, and up to 6Gbit/s on private bandwidth.

Impact of new Advance servers on all our ranges

For more than 20 years, we have believed in bringing value to our customers by managing the production chain and developing innovative technology. We offer them the best performance at the best price, while guaranteeing full control through an open environment.

OVHcloud Industry Manifesto

In line with our industrial strategy, we design machines with dedicated components, which are selected to be easily reused. In the process of building these next-generation servers, we have enriched our catalogue, and we are now able to offer more affordable server ranges with second and third-life components.

The new Advance dedicated servers fall firmly into the mid-range category. This move has triggered what is now referred to as a waterfall at OVHcloud, and this is a key component of our product lifecycle.

Since 28th October 2021, some of the components from the previous Advance and Infrastructure ranges have been made available, and they are adapted to suit the technical specifications of our Rise server range.

Some components of the Rise range will then be available on the ranges associated with the products’ third and fourth lives: So you Start and Kimsufi.

Since we control the entire production chain, we can offer new server generations with the best price-performance ratio in multiple datacentres across the globe, with a very short time to market.

New server generations — a challenging launch

Our new servers are coming to market in an increasingly difficult global environment. With shortages of CPU components, motherboards, network cards and much more, the consequences are both direct and indirect.

Component delivery issues have slowed down our industrial validation processes, and affected the availability of the entire range. This applies to both disk options and operating system compatibility.

You can find all of the disk customisation options associated with each server on our website. In the order process, we will estimate the delivery time for each storage option. This time may vary depending on disk customisation.

In the near future, all of the operating systems and licences compatible with our legacy Advance and Infrastructure servers will be available on this new range.

Today, despite our strong partnerships with technology providers, they have no interest in favouring one provider over another. The expertise of our Purchasing, Industry and Product teams has been put to the test, along with the resilience of our business model.

Faced with a sharp price increase, we offer a new Advance range that is balanced in terms of price and performance.

Our new generation of dedicated servers continues to demonstrate the value of our SMART model: Simple – Multi-local – Accessible – Reversible – Transparent. Above all, it also reflects our determination to meet your needs as closely as possible.

In order to make life easier for our hosting and integration users, we recently finalised our Bare Metal Cloud universe, with high added-value infrastructure and storage services. This new category of products is called Managed Bare Metal, to distinguish itself from dedicated Bare Metal servers that are fully managed by our users.

We operate Managed Bare Metal for them, allowing them to benefit from our automation, orchestration and management capabilities 24/7, while maintaining independence and control over their infrastructures. Therefore, with the enhancement of other virtualisation and storage solutions, our first Managed Bare Metal offering is called “Managed Bare Metal Essentials, powered by VMware®”.

A new generation of Bare Metal

This first building block is based on VMware, and further demonstrates our capacity for innovation and standardisation, thanks to our ecosystem of technological partners. Having been one of the first European cloud providers to launch a Hosted Private Cloud solution using VMware, our service is now available to companies familiar with Bare Metal, who want a ready-to-use, resilient, scalable infrastructure at the best price. These companies no longer want to worry about implementing and managing their infrastructure, instead preferring to focus on their added value and developing their business applications.

Combining the best of both worlds – Bare Metal and virtualisation by VMware – this solution simplifies the management of virtual machines and associated resources, while also enjoying high availability. In just a few clicks, users can deploy, move, size and back up their virtual machines. The Managed Bare Metal Essentials offer helps companies to both save time and increase productivity.

Scalability and data governance

This range is composed of 3 packs:

• The Essentials ESS64 Pack, based on two Intel Xeon E5 2689 V4 single processor hosts with 64 GB of memory and two 2 TB SSD datastores. This infrastructure is fully dedicated and redundant. The bandwidth of the infrastructure’s hardware as well as the public bandwidth is 3 Gbit/s and is unlimited. The VMware Enterprise Plus licence is also available in this pack.
• The ESS128 Essentials Pack and the ESS256 Essentials Pack will be available soon, with an Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 processor and 128 GB of memory for ESS128 and an Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4 dual processor and 256 GB of memory for ESS256. The rest of the pack is identical to the ESS64.

Resources can be reduced or increased depending on the workload. Users can add or delete hosts and datastores directly from the control panel. Additional hosts may be the same or different from the starter pack hosts; for example, ESS128 or ESS256 hosts can be added to an ESS64 Essentials pack. The additional datastores have capacities ranging from 3 TB to 36 TB. New resources are delivered in 30 minutes, and billing is delivered either on a monthly or hourly basis, clearly explained without any unexpected charges.

There are many VMware features available with our packs:

• vMotion to hot-migrate virtual machines without service interruptions
• vSphere High Availability (HA) for automatic reboots in the event of a hardware failure
• DRS (Dynamic Resources Scheduling) that automatically harmonises resource usage to avoid overload
• Fault Tolerance allows VMware to automatically send the virtual machine to a passive host in the event of a host failure, thereby anticipating any service interruptions
• vROps (vRealise Operations) to continuously optimise performance, management, and capacity planning

And additional options are available:

• Automatic backup via our “Veeam managed backup” solution, to ensured that your data is backed up and restored in the event of a problem
• Floating IPs for more flexibility in developing or releasing your applications

Our Managed Bare Metal Essentials offer has been rolled out worldwide, and is now available in several of our datacentres: in France (RBX, SBG), the UK (ERI), Germany (LIM), Canada (BHS) and the United States (HIL, VIN). Users can choose where their infrastructures are hosted, according to their business issues or the local regulations they want to comply with. They also get a ready-to-deploy environment that is fully operational in just a few hours, and can be fully customised to suit their needs.

The Managed Bare Metal Essentials, powered by VMware® offer is further testimony to how we listen to our users and pay attention to how they consume, use and manage their infrastructures. It has been designed in line with our values, and demonstrates our ongoing commitment to simplifying the deployment and management of cloud infrastructures, with simple billing and interfaces that provide the best customer experience, while respecting their fundamental rights and freedoms, including their data protection rights.

There is no other equivalent on the market, and it paves the way for the new managed infrastructure ranges planned for 2021. These new ranges will be available at a very competitive price/performance ratio and will have our two key differentiating markers – reversibility and interoperability – that our users expect. More than ever in 2021, our ability to innovate by providing an ecosystem, and our ability to understand and anticipate the market, will prove to be our best assets.