Squark is a french provider of high-performance web hosting and infrastructure consulting. To reduce costs and gain flexibility the company migrated its IaaS solutions from VMware vSphere to Proxmox VE already back in 2015.
As an IaaS provider, Squark needs to deliver a dependable, secure, high-performing, scalable, and adaptable infrastructure to ensure highly available services, all while providing excellent customer support.
“Our customers rely on our infrastructure for their critical operations, so high availability (HA) and minimal downtime are crucial”, says Julien Houzeaux, CTO at Squark. “Redundancy in servers, storage, and networks is crucial to prevent service disruptions.”
The company’s virtualization infrastructure handles thousands of virtual machines, distributed over several regions and availability zones, each corresponding to 2000 computing cores and 30TB of RAM.
“Back in 2015, the expansion of our business challenged our economic model due to the very high costs associated with operating the VMware solutions vCloud, vSphere and ESXi version 5”, remembers Julien Houzeaux.
Two virtualization technologies for improved efficiency
Squark found Proxmox VE to be an excellent solution to meet these challenges since it combines reliability, flexibility, and economical pricing. Its open-source nature eliminates licensing fees, and optional enterprise support is available.
“The Proxmox virtualization stack is less resource-intensive than that of VMware”, says Julien Houzeaux. “This allowed us to use less powerful hardware more efficiently and to extend the lifespan of existing hardware.”
“Proxmox VE provides us with increased flexibility for different workloads because of its integration of two different kinds of virtualization technologies, KVM for virtual machines, and Linux containers (LXC) for container-based virtualization. Furthermore, advanced features like high availability, live migration, and software-defined storage (SDS) are included by default.”
Smooth migration
Today, Squark’s whole implementation of Proxmox VE is running on an HPE Synergy composable infrastructure based on an HPE Synergy 12000 Frame. “From the beginning of the migration project, the technical team has been very confident regarding compatibility and reliability of running Proxmox VE on our HPE ecosystem, as we ran a lot of benchmarks over HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 servers, and it was working like a charm”, remembers Julien Houzeaux.
The company successfully deployed Proxmox VE for the first time in production in 2015. Following this initial deployment, Proxmox VE gradually replaced Squark’s deployment of the VMware suite. As the complete transition took place in 2016 and there were no advanced migration tools available, an internal workflow had been developed to manage and schedule the V2V (virtual to virtual) migration of the virtual machines to the new clusters. Today, Proxmox VE comes with an integrated Import Wizard for the direct import of guests from other hypervisors.
When the company prepared for the migration, they relied on the extensive project documentation of Proxmox VE, the active community, and technical support, as Julien Houzeaux points out: “The documentation of Proxmox VE is easy to access and use. We have deployed several clusters in a couple of days. The community has also been very active and responsive during our migration project and ever since. Finally, technical support from Proxmox was proactive and helpful during our testing and production phases.”
Proxmox VE increases flexibility
By migrating to Proxmox VE, Squark met the challenges the company faced with VMware's licensing model which had led to high operating costs that had become unsustainable when Squark expanded its infrastructure.
Proxmox VE offers us a degree of flexibility that VMware could not match: The combination of two virtualization technologies, KVM and LXC, allows us to choose the best solution for each workload. Furthermore, Proxmox VE proves to be highly adaptable, since the absence of vendor lock-in gives us the freedom to customize our environment to our specific needs.Julien Houzeaux, CTO
Being an open-source solution, Proxmox VE comes without licensing costs. This had a direct and positive impact on the company’s budget. “We were able to reallocate these resources to other strategic projects,” says Julien Houzeaux. “Proxmox VE offers us a degree of flexibility that VMware could not match. The combination of two virtualization technologies, KVM and LXC, allows us to choose the best solution for each workload. Furthermore, Proxmox VE proved to be highly adaptable, since the absence of vendor lock-in gives us the freedom to customize our environment to our specific needs.”
The comprehensive range of the Proxmox VE enterprise features proved to be a significant asset for Squark. Julien Houzeaux: “Essential features such as high availability and live migration, which were previously costly options in VMware, are integrated in Proxmox VE by default. The integration of different storage solutions strengthened our storage infrastructure, offering better performance and greater reliability.”
Squark has been relying on Proxmox VE for almost ten years now to support its business operations and CTO Julien Houzeaux already has plans for future developments with Proxmox solutions: “We keep an attentive eye on Proxmox Datacenter Manager, as it could improve our global management and business model.”
Julien Houzeaux CTO
About Squark Squark leads a fierce and unique philosophy in IaaS provisioning – high availability is a requirement. Founded in 2014, the company has its headquarters in Paris, France and a staff of 15 employees. Squark offers high-performance web hosting, infrastructure consulting, and optimization services with effective guaranteed fault repair times (GRTs) of up to one hour.
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