Hybrid cloud case study: three sites, one cloud, zero unplanned shop-floor downtime.
How NetSecure Global engineered a 3-site hybrid cloud infrastructure with ERP and an encrypted multi-site mesh for a high-precision CNC laser cutting, bending and heavy fabrication business. Client name withheld by policy.
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Primary production & plant HQ
- WAN: leased line (primary) + broadband (secondary) with multi-WAN failover
- Firewall: firewall with traffic shaping, intrusion detection and prevention, and VLAN isolation
- Virtualization: dual hypervisor: one platform for the directory and remote-desktop servers, a second for the virtual firewall perimeter, on-prem ERP and the web-based production planning tool (MES)
- Storage: network storage in RAID 5, 12 TB pool, 8 TB active (~66.7%), Smart Fetch performance tier
- Remote access: encrypted VPN for field engineers
Secondary operations / remote plant
- WAN: dual broadband with multi-WAN load balancing and failover
- Firewall: firewall with encrypted site-to-site tunnels to Site 1 and Site 3
- Virtualization: a virtualisation host running the virtual firewall, a local remote-desktop server and an ERP instance
Disaster recovery & offsite backup node
- WAN: high-speed broadband behind a firewall
- Backup: dedicated backup repository receiving encrypted snapshots from Sites 1 and 2
- Compute: secondary server instance
AWS workload
- ERP on AWS compute and managed database for high availability and external partner access
- object storage as an offsite target in the replication pipeline
Public VPS
- ERP replica and web front end
- encrypted site-to-site tunnel into the core mesh
Field engineers
- encrypted remote-access VPN for remote management
- No public RDP or file-share exposure
Tip: use Tab and Enter to move between sites.
Storage engineering & Smart Fetch
The network storage runs RAID 5 across four bays: a 12 TB pool carrying an 8 TB active manufacturing footprint, roughly 66.7% utilisation. We monitor against a critical 70–80% threshold for CAD/CAM storage, mitigate RAID 5 rebuild risk, and work around 1GbE bottlenecks with multichannel file sharing.
Smart Fetch, our flash-accelerated storage design, speeds up random IOPS, directory metadata and multi-part CAD assembly parsing. It increases efficiency by 90% and productivity by more than 60%, with the fast tier sized to the 8 TB working set so the mechanical disks are spared almost all random I/O.
- Eliminates assembly bottlenecks for 20 workstations and 30 remote-desktop sessions
- Reduces spindle wear and thermal stress on the HDDs
- SSD endurance and terabytes written (TBW) tracked continuously
- USB/SNMP UPS integration protects read-write cache integrity during power cuts
- Metadata pinning for instant folder indexing
Multi-tier backup & disaster recovery
- Deduplicating backup server: deduplicated, incremental, chunk-based backups of the directory and remote-desktop VMs with near-zero RPO.
- Image-level backup and DR: protection for every VM on the second host (the virtual firewall, ERP and the production-planning MES), with changed-block tracking and instant VM recovery.
- Storage to backup host: automated pulls of file shares and CAD repositories onto high-capacity backup storage.
- Replication: Snapshot replication and versioned backup across the encrypted mesh to Site 3 and AWS object storage.
Applications
ERP (on-prem production instance, with a cloud instance on AWS and a replica on the public VPS) and a proprietary web-based production planning tool (MES).
What we'd harden next
We publish our own critique. For this estate, the roadmap includes:
- Migrating the RAID 5 pool toward RAID 6 / RAIDZ2 as capacity grows
- Automated, encrypted offsite configuration backups for every firewall
- Centralised cross-site telemetry (a SIEM)
- Decommissioning any legacy server operating systems ahead of end of support
"If a provider can't draw your network, they shouldn't be paid to run it." This is the drawing.
Replicate this infrastructure in your facility.
Start with the same on-site engineering audit.