Xelerity — Native MikroTik SD-WAN, provisioning from hours to minutes, fault-proof uptime

About Xelerity

Xelerity is a service provider based near Vicenza, Italy, specialising in managed connectivity on MikroTik infrastructure. The company delivers high-availability network services to business customers, managing its entire router fleet in-house on a Proxmox cluster. After nearly two years of OptiWize in production, Xelerity is one of the Italian reference cases for on-premise SD-WAN management on RouterOS.

The challenge

Before adopting OptiWize, Xelerity already had a structured approach: RouterOS templates, standardised scripts, solid best practices. But as the fleet grew, the limits of the manual model became clear on four fronts:

• Slow provisioning: every new activation required manual variable customisation per customer, testing and deployment — hours of specialist work per device.
• Configuration drift: point changes and template evolution over time made it impossible to guarantee that every router matched the current standard. The real configuration of a device could only be reconstructed by accessing it directly.
• No visibility: no fast answers to questions like "does this router comply with the security policy?", "who changed this route and why?". Auditing and troubleshooting were slow and unreliable processes.
• Fragmented knowledge: the reasoning behind configuration choices lived in individual engineers' heads. If the right person was unavailable, touching that configuration was a risky operation without context or traceability.

How OptiWize helped

Xelerity chose OptiWize for three precise reasons: native RouterOS integration (no abstraction layers that take away direct control of the device), fully on-premise deployment on Proxmox (essential for their customers' compliance and security requirements), and an SD-WAN module that required no hardware change or shift in network philosophy.

In particular, OptiWize's SD-WAN solved a problem that market alternatives couldn't address without proprietary hardware: terminating backup lines from third-party carriers while keeping public IP addresses unchanged. For Xelerity, this translated into a level of business continuity that was previously impossible or extremely complex to achieve manually.

The on-premise deployment gave Xelerity full control over monitoring logs, network flows and management credentials, with the performance of a fully on-net infrastructure and the native reliability of the Proxmox cluster (snapshots, backups, high availability).

Results

After nearly two years in production, the results improve both team operations and the service experience for Xelerity's customers:

• Configuration drift eliminated: every router faithfully reflects centralised policies. Errors from manual typos in RouterOS syntax or firewall rules have practically disappeared.
• Provisioning from hours to minutes: what used to require hours of manual work and testing now resolves in minutes through automated templates and centralised deployment.
• Higher real-world uptime: SD-WAN failover to backup lines (including third-party carriers) is transparent to the end customer. Dropped VPN sessions and unexpected IP changes are a thing of the past.
• Monitoring shifted from reactive to proactive: with integrated monitoring, Xelerity is alerted in real time the moment a link degrades or goes down, enabling intervention while the customer is still browsing without issues.
• Full on-premise control: logs, flows and credentials stay on Xelerity's own infrastructure, with complete sovereignty over data and the service network.