In connection with the large amounts of Corona homework, there has been an explosion in the use of the version of Zoom offered to universities. An increase that looks set to continue into this year. Read more about it here: Zoom breaks all records - again.
Before Corona, there were two internal server zones that took care of the Zoom meetings. But in order to handle the enormous load on the service that suddenly arose, it was both necessary to use the infrastructure to the maximum and to supplement with server capacity at the cloud provider AWS in Stockholm.
The research networks, united under NORDUnet, will of course prefer to be responsible for the entire operation of the service, so it has since been expanded with two zones and now two more zones are added. In total, there will thus be six zones in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, respectively.
All the zones are ready for operation, which means that March will be a test month, where the Nordic research networks will test their own servers in favor of AWS, which will eventually be phased out.
The world's largest "On-Premise solution"
If new sudden loads occur on Zoom, for example in connection with the start of studies after the summer holidays, it may be necessary to expand with more zones. However, the situation is very difficult to predict as no one knows the extent of the reopening of the country at that time.
The infrastructure that is now set up to operate Zoom under the Nordic research networks has developed into the largest “On-Premise solution” of Zoom in the world. It has thus also become an installation where the company behind Zoom gets confirmed stability and quality on a scale not seen before.
