Bruhn Freeman Advanced Solutions

Bruhn Freeman

Advanced Solutions

Home · Our Work · // PROJECT 023 · Enterprise Storage · Data Protection
// PROJECT 023 · Enterprise Storage · Data Protection

Enterprise SAN Storage & Data Protection Re-Architecture

A storage environment that has never lost data can still be one bad cable pull away from an outage. We re-architected a federal agency's storage fabric into a fault-tolerant mesh, rebuilt its backup process around encrypted offsite tape, and held the whole environment to 99.99% availability.

SAN / NASEMC Symmetrix / CLARiiONNetAppHitachi USP-VNetBackupFibre Channel FabricTape EncryptionOracle RMAN
Industry
Federal Government
Scale
Large · Enterprise data center
Status
In production, 99.99% uptime sustained
// Problem

The challenge

A single-path SAN fabric and unencrypted offsite backup media are both single points of failure hiding in plain sight — invisible until a switch fails or a tape goes missing. The agency needed a storage environment engineered to survive a bad day at either layer, not just a well-run one on a good day.

// Solution

What we built

A ground-up re-architecture of the storage and data-protection stack.

  • Rebuilt the Fibre Channel fabric into a dual, meshed, fault-tolerant path across core and edge switches, eliminating single points of failure between hosts and arrays
  • Engineered and administered SAN/NAS storage across EMC Symmetrix/CLARiiON, NetApp, and Hitachi USP-V platforms
  • Made encryption mandatory for all offsite backup tape media
  • Rewrote the Oracle RMAN backup scripts to correctly handle hot, cold, and archive-log backup modes
  • Standardized enterprise backup and recovery on NetBackup across a large enterprise tape-library infrastructure
// Architecture

How it works

Hosts reach shared storage over the dual meshed fabric, so a failed path or switch never isolates a server from its data. Backups run on RMAN-driven schedules tuned to each database's actual operating mode, land on tape through NetBackup, and leave the building encrypted — closing the gap between "backed up" and "actually protected."

// Outcome

Results

  • Sustained 99.99% storage availability across the environment
  • Eliminated single points of failure in the fabric between hosts and arrays
  • Closed a real data-exposure gap by making offsite tape encryption mandatory rather than optional
  • A backup process correctly matched to each database's actual operating mode, rather than one schedule applied everywhere
// Have a similar problem?

Let's talk about what you need built.

Custom-engineered solutions — no generic platforms, no compromises.

Start a Project →