As part of this initiative, OVHcloud offer vouchers to schools and universities, which provide students with the opportunity to learn by doing. These vouchers allow teachers to spawn Public Cloud instances and learn new virtualization software. The vouchers are also used to order dedicated servers for the purpose of supporting e-learning solutions – such as BigBlueButton. The university ISEN Ouest have been doing this since the Covid-19 crisis began.

BigBlueButton in a few words 

BigBlueButton (BBB) is a Web conferencing system dedicated to e-learning. BBB is an Open Source project, initiated in 2007, under GNU LGPL. It provides a wide array of video conference functionalities (audio, video, screen sharing, white board, session recording, etc) all on a simple and intuitive UI. For e-learning, BBB extends its functionalities and compatibility with various Learning Management Systems (LMS); such as Moodle, Canvas, Jenzabar, Sakai  or Schoology. 

BBB @ ISEN 

On March 16^th, France went into lockdown and all the schools and training centres were closed. The day after, ISEN Ouest decided they needed an efficient e-learning solution for its students, so installed BigBlueButton on dedicated servers hosted at OVHcloud. 

The goal – to provide pedagogical continuity for students from campuses at Brest, Nantes and Rennes – meant that the platform solution had to keep several hundreds of students connected every day – with video-conferencing, document sharing, and chat. The challenge was to ensure that the solution was powerful enough to handle such large loads.

To respond to this challenge, ISEN Ouest designed the architecture as follows: 

• One Rise-1 dedicated server on the front, configured as a Scalelite scalable load balancer, connected to the ISEN Ouest Moodle environment.
• Two Infra-1 dedicated servers, with 64 GB RAM and 2 Gbps guaranteed bandwidth, for BBB visio-conference and to host virtual classrooms and meetings. One server is located in one of our data centers in Strasbourg and the other one in Roubaix – this distributes the load and ensures continuity of service in case of failure. 

Finally, the architecture was built by ISEN to be compliant with the one suggested by Scalelite. 

In order to participate in the lessons, students connect to the Digital Workspace provided by ISEN and join a pre-configured classroom in Moodle. They are automatically identified and added to the ‘learner list’. Teachers take on the moderator role for the classroom and can manage their classroom with all the autonomy they need. 

After a few training sessions dedicated to e-learning with BBB, ISEN teachers could provide the vast majority of their scheduled lessons (other than those that require practical tools, such as lab equipment).

Everyday, the platform hosts around 600 students and teachers split between 20 to 40 virtual classrooms. A load balancer absorb peaks of connection between the 2 BBB servers and smooths the load, which can exceed 1 Gbps. 

BBB @ OVHcloud 

We use BigBlueButton at OVHcloud, the first users were the staff of our Training Center. Indeed, as for schools, enterprises must continue to train their employees during the lockdown. 

One week after the French lockdown had started, OVHcloud had to onboard a new batch of employees distributed across the country. Our initial approach was to use our existing internal tools and videoconferencing system. In less exceptional times, it would have worked, but due to the increase in home working – forced by the lockdown – our videoconferencing system was being utilised at a much higher rate and sometimes we lost connection, or the connection was poor.

Thanks to some discussions with Emmanuel, Head of ISEN Nantes and former manager of the Training Center at OVHcloud, we discovered BBB and we wanted to try it. 

Our first test was delivered on one Infra-1 dedicated server:

• Processor : Intel Xeon-E 2274G – 4 c / 8 t – 4 GHz / 4.9 GHz 
• RAM :  32Go
• Storage : 2× 960 Go SSD NVMe Soft RAID 
• Public network : 1 Gbps 
• Private network : 2 Gbps 

After this initial experiment, and thanks to the simplified BBB install scripts, we installed it on a C2-60 Public Cloud instance (16 cores; 60 Go RAM; 400 Go SSD; 1 Gbits guaranteed bandwidth on public network, and up to 4 Gbits on private network). This increased resilience and eased maintenance. 

After a few weeks of usage during training sessions, both trainers and trainees were convinced: 

• No need to install software locally (installed via Web browser).
• Perfect audio and video quality with no latency, 
• Very simple and user-friendly.
• Various interactive modes available: whiteboard, group management, slideshow sharing, etc.
• Easy integration with Moodle. 

BBB @ #Open_Solidarity

Thanks to Worteks, BigBlueButton is one of the tools offered free of charge during the COVID19 crisis. This is possible thanks to our #OpenSolidarity initiative.

So if you’re a teacher or instructor looking for an e-learning solution that is easy to use, with lots of functionality and a rock solid design, check out W’Sweet’s BBB instances.

Guaranteeing health and safety for all employees – an OVHcloud priority

As soon as the WHO classified COVID-19 as an epidemic, we began reinforcing prevention measures. We suspended business travel, and raised awareness of personal hygiene and safety precautions in our sites.

To protect ourselves and other citizens, we took the decision to make everyone work from home (excluding datacentre and factory employees), across all of OVHcloud’s sites worldwide. All of our sites will be closed this week, apart from our production site (which we have changed the shifts for, to keep employee interaction to a strict minimum) and datacentres. We are aware that by protecting our employees, we are doing our part to prevent the virus from spreading on a larger scale.

Ensuring service continuity for our customers

Our teams are making every effort to support you under the best conditions. As a consequence, we are deploying business continuity plans. Our priority is to ensure a high-quality operational service, which is essential for all of our customers’ activity — both for your business, and also on a more strategic, national scale. We intend to apply this worldwide, wherever we have a presence. Our customer support team are also working remotely from home, and will be available to answer support requests as usual. This system — which has already been in effect for 2 weeks in Italy — has now been deployed across all countries with no impact on service quality. We are also protecting employees in our datacentres, with prevention measures reinforced on-site. Today, all datacentre and server maintenance operations can be carried out as usual. Our infrastructure is able to absorb 20Tbps bandwidth, and for this reason, we do not believe that this crisis will impact the quality of service we offer you. We are working in close contact with our suppliers, and we do not expect to experience any provisioning issues for future deliveries required for producing our own servers. “OVHcloud’s teams are working exceptionally,” explains Michel Paulin.

Taking part in the effort: open-solidarity

To combat this healthcare crisis, many companies are working in solidarity with one another, to offer remote working, collaboration and healthcare hosting solutions. Given the gravity of the situation and the self-isolation required in many countries, we can expect these solutions to be in very high demand. Concepts like helping one another and working together as a community are fundamental values of OVHcloud, and they are put into action by our founder — Octave Klaba — and CEO Michel Paulin. As a result, OVHcloud has decided to do everything it can to offer free infrastructures without any commitment period for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. The aim of this is to help and support traffic spikes for websites that fall within these business sectors. Websites and infrastructures receiving free service will also benefit from the same level of maintenance and support.

“#Open_solidarity. This initiative is a collective, open act of digital solidarity — the aim of which is to make reliable tech solutions more widely available by offering them for free on OVHcloud infrastructures. To do this, OVHcloud is delivering web-cloud, bare metal, private cloud and public cloud solutions free of charge for the entire duration of the crisis — and this is for software publishers, start-ups and public service providers. This way, they can also offer free remote working, communication, healthcare and other solutions to SMEs and individuals.”

Michel Paulin, CEO OVHcloud

“OVHcloud is in a strategic sector. Today, the cloud has become an essential infrastructure that makes the world go round — just like air, water, and electricity. In light of this unprecedented healthcare crisis, our daily lives and freedoms have been heavily impacted. Over the next few months, digital services will be in high demand, because they offer a number of solutions for facing the self-isolation required in this situation. Collectively, we need to multiply initiatives for making all of these solutions visible and accessible to everyone. Open solidarity is the guarantee that a free infrastructure can be scaled up enough to meet demand. It is an initiative for solidarity, the sole aim of which is to offer and share OVHcloud expertise with our community.”

Octave Klaba, Founder OVHcloud

Click here to learn more about OVHcloud’s open-solidarity initiative