Senior SAN Infrastructure Specialist

🏗 We're Hiring: Senior SAN Infrastructure Specialist

📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time

💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior

🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a construction-focused organization committed to delivering complex projects through operational excellence, resilient technology infrastructure, and effective collaboration. Our multidisciplinary teams operate across Project Management, Construction, Engineering, Procurement, Commercial, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Design, Quality, HSE, Consultants, Contractors, Suppliers, Logistics, Administration, Information Technology, and Executive Leadership.

Our business relies on reliable, high-performance storage networking to support virtualized infrastructure, engineering applications, databases, project management platforms, enterprise systems, and critical business records. We are committed to maintaining secure, scalable, and highly available Storage Area Network (SAN) environments that protect data availability, support operational continuity, and enable efficient collaboration across offices, construction sites, and remote project locations.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior SAN Infrastructure Specialist to administer, maintain, optimize, and enhance the organization's enterprise Storage Area Network infrastructure. The successful candidate will manage Fibre Channel fabrics, SAN switches, host connectivity, zoning, logical unit number (LUN) provisioning, multipathing, storage access controls, performance monitoring, and SAN resilience.

This role will work closely with Storage Engineering, Server Infrastructure, Virtualization, Backup and Recovery, Network Engineering, Database Administration, Cybersecurity, and Application Support teams to deliver secure, reliable, and high-performing storage connectivity across production, development, testing, and disaster recovery environments.

The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on experience with enterprise SAN technologies, Fibre Channel switching, storage arrays, host bus adapters, multipathing, storage provisioning, fabric troubleshooting, capacity planning, and infrastructure lifecycle management.

Key Responsibilities1. SAN Infrastructure Administration

• Administer, configure, maintain, and support enterprise SAN infrastructure across on-premises and hybrid technology environments.
• Manage Fibre Channel fabrics, SAN switches, fabric services, switch ports, inter-switch links, and associated management platforms.
• Support SAN technologies and equipment from vendors such as Brocade, Cisco MDS, Dell Technologies, HPE, IBM, and other approved enterprise providers.
• Maintain SAN fabric configurations, switch settings, port assignments, connectivity standards, and operational baselines.
• Monitor SAN switch health, hardware status, port conditions, fabric stability, and infrastructure availability.
• Perform routine maintenance, firmware upgrades, configuration backups, and approved infrastructure changes.
• Validate SAN infrastructure health following maintenance, hardware replacement, or configuration modifications.
• Maintain accurate records of switch models, firmware versions, support contracts, licenses, and infrastructure dependencies.
• Ensure SAN environments follow approved technical standards, operational procedures, and security requirements.

2. Fibre Channel Fabric Management

• Configure and maintain Fibre Channel fabrics supporting enterprise storage arrays, physical servers, virtualization clusters, and critical applications.
• Manage fabric topology, switch connectivity, inter-switch links, fabric segmentation, and redundant fabric designs.
• Administer zoning configurations using approved standards, including single-initiator zoning or other supported designs appropriate to the environment.
• Validate fabric membership, name server registrations, device visibility, and connectivity between authorized hosts and storage targets.
• Troubleshoot fabric segmentation issues, domain conflicts, port failures, link instability, and connectivity disruptions.
• Monitor Fibre Channel link utilization, error counters, buffer credit conditions, and other relevant fabric performance indicators.
• Coordinate with storage and server teams to maintain consistent host-to-storage connectivity.
• Support SAN fabric expansion, switch replacement, topology changes, and data center infrastructure upgrades.
• Maintain accurate fabric diagrams, zoning records, port maps, and connectivity documentation.

3. SAN Switch Configuration and Management

• Configure and administer enterprise SAN switches, including switch ports, trunking, port channels, inter-switch links, and supported fabric services.
• Manage switch access, administrative roles, secure management protocols, logging, and configuration backup procedures.
• Monitor switch performance, port errors, link status, and hardware alarms.
• Troubleshoot port flapping, signal degradation, unsupported transceivers, speed mismatches, and physical connectivity problems.
• Validate switch interoperability and compatibility with connected storage arrays, host bus adapters, and other fabric components.
• Apply approved firmware upgrades and security updates in accordance with vendor guidance and change management procedures.
• Support switch replacement, fabric migration, port expansion, and infrastructure refresh activities.
• Maintain consistent configuration standards across production and disaster recovery SAN fabrics.
• Coordinate with vendors to resolve complex switch hardware, firmware, and interoperability issues.

4. Storage Provisioning and LUN Management

• Provision and present block storage resources to authorized servers, hypervisors, databases, and enterprise applications.
• Create and manage storage volumes, LUNs, host groups, initiator groups, target mappings, and access assignments.
• Coordinate with storage array administrators to ensure appropriate capacity, performance, and protection settings.
• Validate host identifiers, including World Wide Names (WWNs), before implementing zoning and storage presentation changes.
• Ensure that each host receives only the storage resources authorized for its role and application requirements.
• Support LUN expansion, removal, remapping, and migration in accordance with approved procedures.
• Validate storage visibility, multipath configuration, and operating system recognition following provisioning activities.
• Coordinate with server, database, and virtualization teams to ensure safe implementation of storage changes.
• Maintain complete records of storage allocations, host mappings, approvals, and implementation results.
• Identify unused, obsolete, or incorrectly mapped storage resources and coordinate appropriate remediation.

5. Host Connectivity and Multipathing

• Administer and troubleshoot SAN connectivity between physical servers, virtualization hosts, storage arrays, and supported operating systems.
• Support host bus adapters (HBAs), Fibre Channel drivers, firmware, multipathing software, and host connectivity configurations.
• Configure and validate multipathing solutions such as VMware Native Multipathing, Microsoft MPIO, Linux device-mapper multipath, or other supported technologies.
• Verify path redundancy, failover behavior, path selection policies, and recovery after connectivity interruptions.
• Investigate missing storage devices, path failures, intermittent access, device discovery problems, and operating system storage errors.
• Coordinate HBA firmware and driver compatibility checks with server and storage teams.
• Support host connectivity for Windows, Linux, VMware ESXi, and other approved enterprise operating systems.
• Validate redundant connectivity across separate SAN fabrics to reduce single points of failure.
• Document host connectivity details, WWN assignments, HBA configurations, multipath settings, and storage dependencies.

6. SAN Performance Monitoring and Optimization

• Monitor Fibre Channel throughput, link utilization, port errors, latency indicators, and storage path performance.
• Investigate slow storage access, application latency, excessive I/O retries, congestion, and intermittent connectivity.
• Analyze SAN switch counters, host HBA statistics, storage array metrics, and relevant infrastructure logs to identify root causes.
• Identify potential congestion, oversubscription, poor workload distribution, and fabric configuration issues.
• Optimize switch port configurations, link speeds, fabric layouts, and supported traffic management settings where appropriate.
• Coordinate with storage and server teams to correlate SAN performance issues with array, host, and application behavior.
• Establish performance baselines for critical storage paths and monitor deviations from expected operating conditions.
• Support performance assessments for database workloads, virtual machine clusters, enterprise applications, and data-intensive engineering systems.
• Recommend infrastructure improvements based on measured performance, utilization, and business requirements.
• Prepare technical reports detailing performance trends, bottlenecks, remediation activities, and improvement opportunities