Union Gas e Luce had a heterogeneous infrastructure that had evolved over time and relied on shared SAN storage – a common approach that can become limiting when scalability and efficiency are priorities. The company had a further competitive advantage: it had been using Proxmox VE for years, both for technical reasons and to avoid complex and costly licensing models.
If Union Gas e Luce was already using Proxmox VE, why did it turn to AXOL Server?
The need for change
The project had two main goals: to transition to a hyper-converged infrastructure, eliminating the complexity associated with SAN storage, and to achieve greater reliability and flexibility, along with faster data access through NVMe storage.
The reasons behind the decision
Union Gas e Luce analyzed a number of Italian providers, but found that few had deep expertise in both Proxmox VE and Ceph. AXOL Server was the most natural choice for a number of reasons:
- most traditional vendors offer Proxmox VE as an additional option;
- AXOL Server assembles pre-configured and optimized clusters in-house in Ivrea, which are delivered ready to connect to the network and begin migration;
- it has no sales staff: the consultants are systems engineers;
- the first call is already a technical discussion in which its engineers analyze workloads, RAM, CPU, and I/O, and design an architecture that can scale over time;
- it is a single point of contact for hardware, hypervisors, backups, subscriptions, and Proxmox support.
A five-server hyper-converged cluster
For Union Gas e Luce, we designed a cluster comprising five physical nodes to operate in an N-1 configuration, ensuring service continuity even in the event of a complete node failure. The system offers a total of 256 allocable vCPUs, 2,048 GB of allocable DDR5 ECC memory, and 80 TB of usable storage, achieved through a large pool of high-endurance Kioxia PCIe Gen5 NVMe data center SSDs with triple redundancy.
At the heart of the system is the Intel Xeon w7-3565X processor, a 32-core, 64-thread solution capable of reaching up to 4.80 GHz in turbo mode. The storage component is based on high-endurance NVMe PCIe Gen5 drives, configured to deliver both high performance and resilience, while the redundant power supply system with 80 PLUS Platinum certification helps maintain the node’s overall reliability. The network has been designed to ensure low-latency communications and high bandwidth availability.
The benefits for Union Gas e Luce
The project with AXOL Server enabled Union Gas e Luce to quickly complete the migration to the new hyper-converged cluster, maximizing efficiency and cost savings:
- delivery speed: cluster designed, configured and tested in less than a month;
- targeted support: assistance from AXOL during the critical stages of migration, with the option of extended support for less experienced customers;
- hardware reuse: old servers repurposed as Proxmox Backup Servers and for disaster recovery;
- significant savings: a 50–60% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) compared with VMware and other enterprise vendors, including hardware and subscription costs.
Who is Union Gas e Luce
The company was founded over 20 years ago with an ambitious goal: to provide reliable, competitively priced energy that is accessible to everyone. Over time, what began as a local business has grown into an established and recognized company serving thousands of households and businesses. Its work is not limited to its core business of selling natural gas and electricity, but also extends to energy efficiency, helping households, apartment buildings, and businesses reduce consumption and use energy more efficiently.
Published on Edge
