Technical Requirements

Making the transition to Class Cloud

We would like to emphasise that the changeover of a system is a major task and that a project leader must be appointed to coordinate users and liaise with all sections in your school and with us at Infospeed’s Headquarters. We recommend that time is allocated for discussions and creation of an implementation plan with one of our consultants.

On-boarding and Training

New Customers

When purchasing Class you will be given a standard training package typically made up of 15 hours training for the Core Module and an additional hour for each additional module.

This is a basic training package, not detailed Class training in full. Class is a huge system and detailed questions will slow progress and may mean additional hours are required. We will keep you informed if the training schedule is slipping. Where possible, please allow the team to carry out the basics during these starter sessions.

All organisations train at different speeds and these initial training hours are a guide only. After each training session you will be asked to carry out tasks which assist you to get used to working with Class and allow you to move onto the next section of the training.

If this work is not completed, it may not be possible to carry out the next section of training or may cause a delay. Where engagement with the Class Systems is not regular from the start, it should be expected that the training hours’ requirement will be increased due to the need to re-cap on items. In these cases the support team will notify you when you are running out of training time and discuss increasing your training hours (charged per hour or in packs of 10 hours for a 20% discount).

It is the Project Manager’s responsibility to ensure that the appropriate members of the team are available for each training session. Please note that we do have limited training slots available and training slots cancelled with less than an hours’ notice will still be charged. Late arrival on an online session will result in a curtailed session charged at full rates as we often have a further session to attend to in the next slot.

If you would like a training database/sandbox to train staff without impacting the live database, please let us know and we will be happy to arrange this.

Please note that users are expected to have Windows and Microsoft Word/Excel knowledge. Training on these is not provided.

Current Customers

We have a document which outlines the minimal changes between Class Cloud and Class.NET. There is no particular training requirement but if you have any questions please contact support@infospeed.co.uk.

Once you are installed, all training is handled by one of our in-house training consultants. This includes discussions on the major items in Class and the most appropriate way of setting or entering data to meet the user’s requirements.

Technical Requirements

Class Cloud is the perfect administration or management software package whether you are a small independent language school or a large international group.

Class is now available on a multi-tenancy server platform based on the cloud. You therefore need to have access to the Internet with a good connection. Email us at sales@infospeed.co.uk to request our white paper on how to test and improve your Internet connectivity.

In order to access the cloud, your users will need the following minimum specifications:

Microsoft Windows

• Microsoft Windows 10
• Access to Remote Desktop 8.0 or above
• Internet Explorer 10 or above

Mac OS / iOS

• Access to the AppStore
• Ability to install Microsoft Remote Desktop

Android

• Access to PlayStore
• Ability to install Microsoft Remote Desktop

Cloud Technical Specification and Details

Infrastructure

Class Cloud is designed to sit on our Multi-Tenancy platform. For some larger organisations, it may be a requirement to have a separate Cloud based server infrastructure to control upgrades due to the need to check compatibility with “back end” integrations. If this is likely to be the case, please contact us to discuss your requirements and we can quote for this.

Data Centre Redundancy

We have chosen to use OVH as our dedicated hardware provider. OVH have multiple data centres on a global scale. Being the hardware provider, OVH are tasked with the responsibility of physically maintaining the Servers our Infrastructure is hosted on. As such, this means OVH are in control of ensuring our Servers are provided with power as well as an internet connection.

OVH have multiple redundancies in place, which you can read about here.

These include:

• Dual Power Supplies per physical server;
• Each Data Centre is supplied by two separate power sources (UPS Units / Diesel Generators);
• Anti DDoS Protection;
• Each Data Centre has multiple Internet Line backups.

Class Infrastructure Redundancy

Within our private cloud infrastructure there are multiple points of failover.  A very basic scaled down overview of this is as follows:

When first connecting to our infrastructure, you will be connecting to a load balancer.  This load balancer will monitor current network and processing load of all remote desktop servers within our server farm, selecting the most suitable, available and healthy remote desktop server for you to connect to.  This ensures that you will never be placed on a server with ‘noisy neighbours’ that may affect your Class experience.

Utilising a load balancer allows us to control which remote desktop servers are available for use. Should a remote desktop server require maintenance or encounter issues, it can be removed from the pool by disallowing future logins. In the event of a remote desktop server facing a hardware or software failure, the load balancer can route logins to that of an available server to keep Class available to you.

High Availability

Class databases are hosted within a high availability SQL cluster. This means databases will be replicated over a number of SQL servers. Should a SQL server node encounter an issue, it can be removed from the cluster and maintenance completed, with a seamless switch over that you won’t even notice.

In addition to the redundancy steps taken above, within our high availability farm, servers will span across multiple OVH data centres. This will cover against the extremely unlikely event of a data centre failure.

Our engineers will be proactively monitoring the health and performance of our infrastructure farm. As a result, the total number of remote desktop and SQL servers available on our infrastructure will vary, based on current and predicted load. As an example, more servers will be available over summer as this is a particularly busy period.

Backups

In addition to the redundancy steps we’ve taken above, we have also introduced a 4-tier backup plan to protect against system failure, corruption and/or data loss.

Hard Disk Failure

All servers within our infrastructure are equipped with a soft raid-1. This means all data on each server is mirrored across two physical disks. This prevents loss of data in the event of a hard disk failure.

Data Loss

Each customer will have a scheduled daily backup to a local backup disk, which again is included within the soft raid-1 above. This gives us instant access to restore a copy of your data from the previous day, should this be required.

Failure of Backup

Each daily backup that is taken to the local backup disk above, is also copied across to our dedicated backup server housed within our infrastructure. This will keep an archive of a month’s daily backups.

“End of the World” Scenarios

As a last step approach, for protection of a fatal outage within all of the data centres that our infrastructure is hosted on, each month’s archive that is stored on our backup server is additionally uploaded to a service called Crashplan. This will keep a total cycle of 3-months’ of backups (90 days)

In addition to the 4-tiers above, we are also happy to provide customers with a downloadable copy of their backups if required. Should a bespoke backup solution be required, we are happy to accommodate this.

Class Online Toolkit (COT) Module

For customers on Class Cloud:

The COT booking templates will simply be placed on our cloud infrastructure and we will work with you to integrate these onto your website.

For customers not on Class Cloud:

The Online Toolkit module uses a .net dll to allow communications between your website and the Class database. The .net dll needs to be situated on a server (within the local network running Class) that has direct access to the Internet; typically this would be on a web server or an exchange server, where the server security protocols can be configured to protect access.

Next Steps

We look forward to welcoming you on board as a Class Cloud customer.
In order to discuss next steps, please contact us on sales@infospeed.co.uk.