Project Name
Zero Data Loss Across 2 Bare-Metal Sites for a Data Analytics Firm Using MinIO Active-Active Replication
The client is a mid-size data analytics firm headquartered in India, delivering large-scale data processing, business intelligence, and reporting services to enterprise customers across multiple sectors. Operating entirely on bare-metal infrastructure, the organisation manages significant volumes of unstructured data, such as documents, logs, model artefacts, and analytical outputs, stored across on-premises MinIO object storage clusters.
With a growing enterprise client base demanding higher availability and redundancy guarantees, the firm needed to ensure its object storage layer could survive site-level failures without data loss or extended downtime.
The engagement was driven by a single requirement: establish active-active replication between two existing MinIO deployments on bare-metal hardware, without cloud migration and without application rewrites.
Two MinIO deployments on the same premises, no replication between them, and enterprise clients depending on the data held in both.
- No Object Storage Replication: All buckets and objects existed on a single MinIO deployment with no synchronised copy. Any site-level failure would result in complete data unavailability until manual restoration from backups, with no guaranteed recovery point.
- Single-Site Data Residency Risk: All client datasets, analytical outputs, and model artefacts were stored in one physical location, creating business continuity and compliance risks for enterprise customers who expected geographic redundancy as a baseline requirement.
- Manual Bucket and User Synchronisation: When new buckets or IAM policies were created on one MinIO instance, administrators had to manually replicate configurations to the second site, a process that was error-prone, time-consuming, and frequently fell out of sync.
- No Real-Time Object Availability Across Sites: Objects uploaded to one deployment were inaccessible from the other until a manual sync cycle was triggered, preventing the team from treating both sites as a unified storage layer and fragmenting operational workflows.
- Bare-Metal Infrastructure Constraints: Cloud-native replication solutions and managed object storage services were not viable due to existing on-premises hardware commitments and data sovereignty requirements; the solution had to work entirely within existing infrastructure.
- Recovery Time Dependent on Data Volume: Without active replication, disaster recovery relied on periodic backups, meaning recovery time scaled linearly with data volume, potentially taking hours for terabyte-scale datasets with no bound on data loss.
As an AI-first DevOps consulting company, Ksolves designed and deployed a MinIO active-active site replication architecture across the client's two bare-metal deployments, enabling bidirectional real-time synchronisation of all buckets, objects, IAM users, and policies. The approach leveraged MinIO's native site replication protocol, eliminating the need for external orchestration tools or cloud intermediaries entirely.
- MinIO Site Replication Configuration: Established bidirectional site replication between two bare-metal MinIO clusters, ensuring every bucket, object, and metadata change on either site is automatically propagated to the other in near-real time, eliminating single-site data residency risk entirely.
- Active-Active Topology: Configured both MinIO deployments as active-active peers, allowing simultaneous read and write operations on either site, removing the manual synchronisation burden and enabling both deployments to serve as fully capable primary endpoints.
- IAM and Policy Replication: Extended replication beyond object data to include IAM users, groups, policies, and bucket configurations, ensuring access controls remain consistent across both sites without manual intervention and resolving the configuration drift that had existed between deployments.
- Replication Health Monitoring: Implemented replication lag monitoring and health checks, providing real-time visibility into synchronisation status between both sites, with automated alerts on replication failures or lag exceeding defined thresholds.
- Zero Application Changes: Designed the replication layer to operate transparently beneath existing data pipelines and analytics workflows. No application code, SDK configurations, or bucket naming conventions required modification during or after deployment.
Technology Stack
| Category | Technolgoy |
|---|---|
| Infrastructure | MinIO |
| Architecture | Site Replication (Active-Active) |
| Infrastructure | Bare-Metal Servers (2 Sites) |
| Database | S3-Compatible API |
| DevSecOps | Replication Monitoring |
From a single-site storage risk to two fully synchronised active deployments on the same hardware, without a line of application code changed.
- Zero Data Loss Achieved Across 2 Physical Sites: Active-active replication ensures every object exists on both sites simultaneously, replacing a single bare-metal deployment where any site failure risked complete and potentially unrecoverable data loss.
- Recovery Point Objective Reduced to Near-Zero: Continuous bidirectional replication maintains sub-minute RPO, with objects available on both sites within seconds of creation, replacing a periodic backup model where the most recent copy could be hours or days old at the point of failure.
- Manual Synchronisation Eliminated Entirely: MinIO site replication automatically synchronises all buckets, objects, IAM users, and policies bidirectionally, replacing a manual process that was error-prone, operationally expensive, and a consistent source of configuration drift between sites.
- Zero Application Code Changes Required: The replication layer operates transparently beneath all existing data pipelines and analytics workflows. Zero lines of application code were modified across the entire platform, with no SDK reconfiguration or endpoint changes required.
- Object Availability Across Both Sites in Near-Real-Time: Active-active topology enables immediate read and write access on either site, with replication lag maintained under 60 seconds for standard workloads, replacing a fragmented model where objects on one site were invisible to the other until a manual sync was triggered.
Storing terabytes of enterprise client data on a single bare-metal deployment with no replication is not a gap in the architecture; it is an unacceptable liability that grows with every dataset added and every enterprise client onboarded. This organisation had two MinIO deployments and no synchronisation between them. Ksolves connected them. Both sites now operate as active peers, every object written to one is replicated to the other in near-real-time, and the manual synchronisation process that was creating configuration drift between sites is gone entirely.
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