“The Azion Platform has provided us with the flexibility we needed to manage the delivery of a large volume of video content to students enrolling at UNINTER hubs across Brazil and thus provide experience at a speed essential for quality distance education.”
Reginaldo Servilha de Carvalho, Coordinator of Transmission Infrastructure and Studio at UNINTER
Challenge
UNINTER is a reference in distance learning in Brazil, largely due to its advanced Virtual Learning Environment (AVA — Ambiente Virtual de Aprendizagem). The platform is accessed by more than 300,000 students across more than 700 cities in Brazil.
Speed, reliability and availability are crucial factors for delivering the best possible learning experience. In practice, this means:
- video lessons that load faster with ultra-low latency;
- content and features accessible from any device; and
- a distance learning platform available 24/7 for all students.
Faced with these challenges, UNINTER prepared for a future with more connected devices and higher demand for connectivity, which will continue to grow as 5G expands across the country.
Solution
UNINTER partnered with Azion to replace its legacy CDN solution with a platform capable of delivering the performance and availability required by its VOD (video on demand) application.
Complemented by microcache rules configured in Cache, Applications enable accelerated content delivery through Azion infrastructure, allowing UNINTER students to watch video lessons from any device with extremely low latency, even in locations with limited internet connectivity.
In addition to the vast amount of video content available on the learning platform, UNINTER produces more than 20,000 video lessons every year — equivalent to 10,000 feature films — and Cache provides the scalability required to deliver this content without impacting the origin infrastructure.
Using data intelligence to manage content distributed through Azion infrastructure, UNINTER specialists define which content should remain in the primary cache layer and for how long, as well as which videos should be delivered through the intermediate layer, Tiered Cache.
Tiered Cache allows videos that are not present in the primary cache layer to be delivered through a second caching layer instead of directly from UNINTER’s servers, resulting in content delivery up to 30× faster than traditional cloud environments and significantly reducing load on the origin infrastructure.
Results and impact
Approximately 90% of UNINTER’s application data was delivered directly through Azion infrastructure. In addition, 85% of all content accessed by UNINTER students was distributed through Tiered Cache.
Considering the reduction in bandwidth consumption, more than 2.3 PB of data were delivered through Azion infrastructure in 2022 alone, enabling UNINTER to save an average of 520 Mbps of bandwidth in its origin infrastructure.
The gains achieved with the Azion Platform also enabled UNINTER to implement important initiatives during a critical moment, such as offering 19 free online courses open to the public throughout Brazil, with the same quality as the institution’s 250 undergraduate and graduate programs.
About UNINTER
The UNINTER Group is among the largest names in Brazil’s education sector and has spent 25 years developing initiatives that democratize higher education. One of the group’s main institutions is the International University Center UNINTER, one of the few distance education institutions in Brazil re-accredited with the highest rating by the Ministry of Education (MEC) and score 4 in the General Index of Courses (IGC).
Headquartered in Curitiba (PR) and operating throughout Brazil and internationally, the institution has already surpassed 505,000 graduates and currently has more than 300,000 active students enrolled in over 400 programs, including undergraduate, graduate, master’s, doctoral, technical, and extension courses.
UNINTER maintains approximately 700 distance learning support centers, five campuses in Curitiba, and 12 international units.