Hyper-converged
The same machines do virtualization and storage, inside a single Proxmox VE cluster. Less hardware to buy, to power and to manage.
Infrastructure
Ceph
We design and run distributed storage with Ceph. The certification is issued by Red Hat, and few companies in Italy hold it.
What Ceph is
A storage system that spreads data across many machines rather than keeping it on one appliance. When a disk or a whole node fails, the data stays available and the system repairs itself. It grows by adding machines, without stopping.
- Type
- Distributed storage, no single point of failure
- Block
- RBD — disks for virtual machines and containers
- File
- CephFS — shared filesystem, mountable from several machines
- Object
- RGW — object storage compatible with S3 and Swift
- Growth
- Nodes added live, without downtime
- Redundancy
- Replication or erasure coding, configurable
- Integration
- Native in Proxmox VE, and on standalone clusters
- Licence
- LGPL — free software
Two possible architectures
Dedicated cluster
Ceph on its own machines, separate from compute, bare metal included. Needed when storage has to grow on its own terms, serve several clusters, or take loads that would disturb the virtual machines.
What we do
Design
How many nodes, how many disks, what network. Sizing decides whether the cluster holds when a node goes down: it is where mistakes are made, and they surface late.
Deployment
Installation, replication rules, integration with virtualization, and failure testing before anything goes into production.
Maintenance and upgrades
Version upgrades, disk replacement, data rebalancing, expansion with new nodes. A Ceph cluster needs looking after, not installing and forgetting.
Disaster recovery
Degraded clusters, collapsed performance, data that will not come back, an upgrade gone wrong. We work on installations built by others too.
Emergencies
When storage is down and unresponsive, we step in straight away. That is the moment you want someone who has seen it before.
What we work with
When it makes sense
Ceph is worth it from three nodes up, when data cannot stop and the volume grows over time. Below that there are simpler answers, and we will say so rather than sell you a cluster you do not need.
A service dedicated to Ceph support
For anyone who needs Ceph support alone — emergencies and performance tuning included — we run a separate service, with a site of its own.
Have storage to design, or storage that is misbehaving?
Tell us the situation: how much data, how many nodes, what worries you. We give an opinion before any quote.