Native operational continuity
Data is always highly available, automatically replicated across the cluster nodes, with an RTO of zero in the event of a single fault.
Case study · Public Administration
The Municipality of Padua strengthens resilience and operational continuity with Proxmox VE and Ceph
Facing the requirements of the Three-Year Plan for IT in Public Administration and the need to modernise an infrastructure distributed across two data centers, the Municipality of Padua built a hyperconverged Proxmox VE + Ceph cluster with Rackone: native high availability, operational continuity and full regulatory compliance.
- 700+ active customers
- H24 support, every day
- GDPR data kept in Italy
Project numbers
What the Municipality achieved
RTO 0
For single faults, with automatic data replication
12 nodes
Dell PowerEdge R740XD in a hyperconverged cluster
115+ TB
Usable storage, replicated through Ceph
4 months
January to April 2022, migration included
The context
Over 207,000 residents, critical services across two data centers
The Municipality of Padua is one of the leading administrative centres in northeastern Italy: the Department of Innovation and Digital Transition manages the digital civil registry, taxation, building permits, urban mobility and a wide range of internal applications. Data security, operational continuity and system reliability have a direct impact on the daily lives of over two hundred thousand people. Historically the infrastructure was distributed across the Sarpi and Gozzi data centers, interconnected through proprietary fibre-optic links.
- 36 nodes and 912 compute cores in total
- 3.8 TB of RAM and more than 350 TB of storage
- Critical services: civil registry, taxation, permits, mobility
The challenge
A data center to rethink: regulatory constraints and architectural limits
The Three-Year Plan required a significant rationalisation of Public Administration data centers: the Municipality's Type B facility was scheduled for decommissioning in favour of qualified solutions: Type A data centers, the National Strategic Hub or AGID-certified cloud services. Although Proxmox was already the virtualisation platform, the infrastructure was not truly hyperconverged: it lacked a distributed storage layer as a persistent platform for VMs and data, and the master-slave configuration between the two sites did not provide the flexibility and resilience a modern infrastructure requires.
- Type B data center to be decommissioned within AGID deadlines
- Heterogeneous Proxmox clusters, different versions and capacities
- Master-slave redundancy without true high availability
The requirement was twofold: to comply with the Three-Year Plan by placing our systems in a qualified data center, and at the same time to evolve towards a truly hyperconverged architecture, overcoming the limitations of a heterogeneous setup based on Proxmox clusters with different versions and capacities.
The solution
Proxmox VE and Ceph as the foundations of resilience
The project, funded under the POR FESR 2014-2020 programme "Promoting digital citizenship", deployed a hyperconverged infrastructure at the VSIX Data Center in Padua, a facility qualified in accordance with national guidelines. As a Proxmox Gold Partner and Authorised Training Partner, Rackone supported the Municipality through every stage: technology validation, architectural design, implementation and workload migration. Compute and storage are natively integrated on the same nodes: no external SAN, automatic data replication, and an architecture ready to stretch across up to three distinct sites.
- 12 × Dell PowerEdge R740XD, 2 × Xeon Gold 6238R and 768 GB RAM per node (9.2 TB total)
- Over 115 TB usable storage replicated through Ceph, up to 250 virtual machines
- Ceph, Corosync, backup and migration networks logically separated: HPE 5945 10Gb + Aruba 2930M
- Proxmox Backup Server with more than 400 TB of capacity: RTO 0 for single faults, RPO 24 hours
The benefits
Operational continuity and regulatory compliance
Regulatory compliance
Hosting at the VSIX Data Center made it possible to decommission the Type B data center in line with the AGID Three-Year Plan, while maintaining direct control over the infrastructure.
Scalability and flexibility
The modular architecture allows future expansion without invasive reconfiguration, up to a stretched cluster across three sites.
The choice of a hyperconverged architecture based on Proxmox VE and Ceph has allowed us to combine technological modernisation with compliance with regulatory requirements. The partnership with Rackone was instrumental in ensuring the robustness of the implementation.
A path of continuous evolution
From migration to an internal cloud platform
2021-2022
Workload migration
Full migration from legacy systems to the new hyperconverged cluster, upgrading all nodes to the latest stable Proxmox VE, in four months.
2022-2025
Backup and containers
Adoption of Proxmox Backup Server and Docker orchestration on open OCI standards with CI/CD pipelines: stronger continuity and application governance.
Training
Staff autonomy
Proxmox certification courses delivered by Rackone for internal staff: operational autonomy and a consolidated return on the technology investment.
Does your administration need to leave a Type B data center too?
We design AGID-compliant hyperconverged Proxmox VE + Ceph clusters, with assisted migration and certified staff training.
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