Proxmox and Ceph Customer On Prem Pros
May 5, 2025
In this episode of OnPrem Pros, your hosts from xByte Technologies sit down with Nicholas Coker and Justin Payne from Smart Communications to share their real-world journey into deploying Proxmox and Ceph. The discussion covers the reasons behind moving away from cloud services, lessons learned from testing and scaling, and the technical challenges they overcame while building a robust on-prem infrastructure with open-source solutions.
Key Points
- Smart Communications transitioned from AWS to a self-hosted solution to manage rising storage costs, leveraging Proxmox and Ceph.
- The team highlights significant cost savings and increased control over their infrastructure as key benefits of going open source.
- Real-world testing, including power failures and network sabotage, was critical in understanding the resilience and limitations of their setup.
- Disk IO and fiber reliability surfaced as recurring pain points, prompting considerations for NVMe and newer hardware.
- Despite the learning curve, the team would make the same decision again, with a few hardware and networking adjustments.
Why Proxmox and Ceph
To validate the PowerStore deployment, xByte set up a hands-on test in their Solutions Lab. The customer was able to simulate failures, verify system redundancy, and assess manageability.
- Customers often perceive open source as less reliable or harder to support.
- Smart Communications found Proxmox simple to deploy and manage, even with 18-node clusters.
- Open source provides flexibility and customization unmatched by commercial platforms.
- Ceph added complexity, especially with networking and fiber configurations.