The U.S. Postal Service’s Informed Visibility Mail Tracking system is the USPS single source for near real-time letter and flat mail tracking information for businesses that are tracking domestic-bound barcoded letters, flats, bundles, handling units and containers.

RhinoSource was brought in by DataStax to analyze multiple large-scale DataStax Enterprise Cassandra and Solr Search clusters that house an enormous amount of data for this high-volume system, to ensure the DataStax clusters were healthy and could handle the significantly increased loads during the peak holiday season.

RhinoSource made detailed recommendations to improve cluster performance and address issues that were identified.

RhinoSource also helped with plans to upgrade DataStax software at USPS and to migrate workloads to a new generation of server hardware with zero downtime, as well as helped load test production-like workloads on DataStax Astra DBaaS.

GE Aerospace (NYSE: GE) is a world-leading provider of jet and turboprop engines, as well as integrated systems for commercial, military, business and general aviation aircraft.

GE Aerospace uses Cassandra and Solr to capture and house jet engine test data generated onsite at its engine testing centers. GE Aerospace uses DataStax Advanced Replication to consolidate this data back to their centralized cluster at their headquarters in near-real-time, where data scientists produce engine test diagnostic reports and engine maintenance recommendations.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into GE Aerospace to help plan a major upgrade of the Cassandr/Solr clusters to the current DataStax Enterprise version.

RhinoSource also helped DataStax Support troubleshoot Advanced Replication issues associated with the new DataStax version and assisted GE Aerospace with security hardening to comply with federal regulations.

Western Union (NYSE: WU) is a 172-year-old remittances company in the process of transforming its digital infrastructure to compete in the 21st Century. WU’s major systems architectural renovation included scripted deployments of right-sized DataStax Enterprise Cassandra, Solr Search, Spark Analytics, DSE Graph and OpsCenter clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using blueprint templates that fit each application’s specific use case requirements.

DataStax engaged RhinoSource to review Western Union’s application data models and access paths and recommend the proper use of DSE features including TTL, Solr indexes, Spark Analytics and Kafka integration that would ensure that Western Union’s applications would be efficient, scalable and able to meet the business’s SLAs.

RhinoSource created a comprehensive set of DataStax Reference Architecture blueprints for Western Union, including AWS instance types and storage configuration recommendations, to allow DevOps automation to be created that would support multiple tiers of DSE service on AWS across the full Development, Test and Production application lifecycle: from simple, single-region Cassandra-only deployments to complex, multi-region Spark, Solr and DSE Graph deployments.

RhinoSource also delivered a comprehensive DSE runbook for the DataStax system administration team, including best practice procedures for cluster management and best use of OpsCenter across multiple datacenters.

Finally, RhinoSource assisted the Western Union application development team with design of DSE Graph schemas to support fraud detection use cases.

Safeway, the American supermarket chain that is a subsidiary of Albertons (NYSE: ACI), relies upon DataStax Enterprise deployed in the Azure cloud for their online customer loyalty web and mobile application experience, which services over 6 Million users and 1 Billion coupon clips per year across 904 locations in 17 states.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Safeway to review their Cassandra and Solr Search clusters to ensure that best practices were being followed and performance was optimized.

RhinoSource reviewed Safeway’s DataStax cluster architecture and configurations, as well as reviewed Safeway’s data models and Solr indexes, and made architectural and configuration recommendations to improve cluster performance and reliability.

RhinoSource also helped plan major upgrades for DataStax software, helped with multi-region bidirectional advanced replication scenarios and recommended improvements for cluster monitoring and alerting.

Kroger (NYSE: KR), the American retail company that operates thousands of supermarkets throughout the US, deployed DataStax Enterprise Cassandra to house large real-time data sets behind their omni-channel customer retail experience applications.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Kroger to review their existing DataStax Enterprise clusters as well as to assess a new DataStax cluster that was being readied for go-live. RhinoSource conducted detailed analysis to ensure that performance settings, security, encryption and authentication methods were in line with best practices.

RhinoSource made recommendations to improve overall DataStax cluster operations, monitoring, security, performance and reliability, as well as recommended approaches for leveraging VMWare to modernize existing projects and bring new projects online faster.

Finally, RhinoSource helped to identify DataStax Enterprise Spark Analytics use cases and recommended architectural changes to maximize the performance of Spark workloads while minimizing their impacts on production Cassandra workload performance.

eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), the global e-commerce leader, uses DataStax Enterprise Cassandra to house their massive highly-categorized product item catalog, which contains hundreds of millions of product items transacted by their customers, organized to allow buyers to easily find what they are looking for.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into eBay to provide onsite support and Cassandra performance troubleshooting during the seasonal peak online traffic period, when the DataStax clusters were under the most stress. RhinoSource analyzed the production DataStax systems in real time as they were being maximally loaded and documented issues.

RhinoSource investigated and identified the root cause of latency issues across the 12 sharded DataStax Enterprise clusters housing the large product catalog, which was causing an imbalanced number of connections per cluster.

RhinoSource reviewed the overall DataStax architecture and application code and recommended tuning adjustments and keyspace replication changes to fix the issue and made DataStax Java driver code change recommendations to improve overall read performance.

Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU) uses DataStax Enterprise Cassandra as their high-performance and scalable data storage solution for a number of their SaaS products, including TurboTax and QuickBooks Self-Employed (SE).

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Intuit to provide DataStax Enterprise Cassandra zero-downtime hardware migration and DSE upgrade assistance. RhinoSource thoroughly analyzed the DataStax Cassandra environment and reviewed, improved and assisted with the execution of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux migration and DataStax software upgrade plan.

RhinoSource also investigated cluster data imbalance problems that Intuit was experiencing and assisted the cluster ops team with failed node replacement procedures.

RhinoSource reviewed the QuickBooks SE schema design, implementation plan and DevOps process and made recommendations to improve performance, scalability and reliability and helped identify DSE Spark Analytics use cases.

Verizon Communications, Inc. (NYSE: VZ) replaced slow and expensive legacy batch processing with DataStax Enterprise Cassandra and Spark Analytics to capture real-time customer event streams, enabling customer-facing applications to create welcoming first impressions and deliver excellent customer online experiences.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Verizon to review Verizon’s DataStax deployment to ensure they were ready for go-live.

RhinoSource reviewed Verizon’s architecture design of production and pre-production DataStax clusters, their cluster settings across data centers and their data model designs for operational readiness and to ensure they would perform as expected.

RhinoSource also coached the application development team on data modeling, coding and tuning best practices and advised how to use Spark for real-time dashboards.

Finally, RhinoSource mentored Verizon’s system administrators on DataStax Enterprise cluster configuration, monitoring, troubleshooting and maintenance and helped them troubleshoot cluster issues.

T-Mobile US, Inc. (NASDAQ: TMUS) uses DataStax Enterprise Cassandra as a high-performance, horizontally-scalable real-time data store behind some of their most critical customer-facing systems.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into T-Mobile to assist with operational support for their DataStax Enterprise Cassandra clusters and to assist with security and backup & recovery setup. RhinoSource reviewed T-Mobile’s DataStax Enterprise architecture, configuration, data models and application code and made recommendations to improve overall performance and reliability.

RhinoSource helped T-Mobile set up SSL and Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for the DataStax Enterprise clusters, to meet stringent enterprise security requirements, assisted with testing of node and data center failure and recovery scenarios, as well as investigated cluster replication and gossip issues, making recommendations that resolved the issues that were discovered.

RhinoSource coached the T-Mobile ops team through DataStax Enterprise cluster maintenance and node operations, general performance tuning, data export/import and educated the team on anti-patterns. RhinoSource guided T-Mobile system administrators through the setup of LDAP security integration for OpsCenter, helped configure automated OpsCenter backups to Amazon S3 for point-in-time recovery and provided best practices for setting up OpsCenter dashboards and proactive alerts.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), chose DataStax Enterprise Cassandra to store very large distributed data sets for configuration management and subscription renewal Cloud services used by partners and customers. Cassandra’s active-active replication across multiple data centers, its linear scalability, fault-tolerance and zero-downtime upgrades are key reasons why Cisco picked DataStax Cassandra for these always-on Cloud services.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Cisco to review and thoroughly check the DataStax Enterprise Cassandra and Solr Search clusters to validate cluster health and make recommendations to fix issues and improve performance.

RhinoSource reviewed multiple production DataStax Enterprise Cassandra and Solr deployments, investigated and resolved issues, and recommended tuning parameter changes to improve performance. RhinoSource also made recommendations for Cisco’s regular cluster maintenance and backup/restore procedures.

Finally, RhinoSource provided a benchmarking methodology to determine maximum cluster i/o capacity, made recommendations to upgrade hardware to meet best practices and provided a detailed zero-downtime DataStax Enterprise upgrade procedure.

BNSF Railway Co. (NYSE: BNSF) was working to improve their mission critical transportation management applications by leveraging DataStax Enterprise Cassandra and DSE Graph as the high-performance and horizontally-scalable data storage backend.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into BNSF Railway to review their DataStax Enterprise infrastructure and assess its ability to to meet BNSF’s system SLAs.

RhinoSource conducted a thorough review of BNSF’s DataStax Enterprise architecture, configurations, data model and cluster maintenance operations, investigated existing issues and made detailed recommendations across all of these areas to improve performance, scalability and reliability.

RhinoSource presented best practices to BNSF’s DataStax Enterprise system administrators and developers and helped identify DataStax DSE Graph use cases.

Chicago Board Options Exchange (BATS: CBOE) chose Apache Cassandra as a highly-available distributed data storage solution within their real-time financial market data architecture.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into CBOE to provide architectural, data modeling, operations and performance tuning guidance, as well as to help investigate and resolve critical issues.

After a thorough review and investigation, RhinoSource provided actionable recommendations to improve performance and streamline operations, which resolved the critical issues and prevented them from reoccurring.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) is a global content delivery network, cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services. Akamai's Intelligent Edge Platform is one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms.

Akamai's Global Traffic Management (GTM) service is a fault-tolerant solution that makes intelligent routing decisions based on real-time data center performance health and global Internet conditions to route online user requests to the most appropriate data center using an optimized Internet route for that user at that moment. Akamai uses Apache Cassandra as a distributed fault-tolerant data store within their infrastructure.

DataStax recommended RhinoSource to Akamai to perform a risk assessment of their open source Apache Cassandra implementation, evaluating how well the implementation allows Akamai’s ability to achieve its key Quality of Service (QoS) goals. RhinoSource investigated production issues and made forward-looking recommendations for cluster tuning, performance, capacity planning, operations management, security and best practices for software development.

Verisk Analytics, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSK) is a multinational data analytics and risk assessment firm with customers in insurance, natural resources, financial services, government, and risk management sectors. Verisk uses proprietary data sets and industry expertise to provide predictive analytics and decision support consultations in areas including fraud prevention, actuarial science, insurance coverage, fire protection, catastrophe and weather risk, and data management.

Verisk uses Cassandra and Solr Search to power its proprietary insurance data services.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Verisk to do a cluster health checkup and ensure that their Cassandra, Solr Search and Spark Analytics deployments were ready for go-live. RhinoSource conducted a thorough review of Verisk’s cluster architecture, configuration and schema design and made both immediately-actionable and long-term recommendations to segregate workloads, streamline compaction, improve data consistency and increase query performance.

In preparation for go-live, RhinoSource assisted the Verisk Ops team with the creation of a new regional data center and testing of failed node recovery procedures, making tuning recommendations that greatly sped up data transfer and node recovery times. RhinoSource also investigated specific Cassandra, Solr and Spark issues and made recommendations to address the problems, eliminate errors and stabilize the production cluster.

Finally, RhinoSource helped resolve issues with DataStax OpsCenter monitoring agents and help set up the OpsCenter repair service, backup/recovery service and OpsCenter dashboards & alerts that would help the team proactively monitor and keep the DSE cluster running in a healthy state.

GE Digital is a subsidiary of General Electric (NYSE: GE) and provides software and industrial internet of things services to industrial companies.

GE Digital built their Predix asset management platform, used by the oil & gas and aviation industries, on top of Cassandra and Graph db.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into GE Digital to help improve performance and solve production issues of the DataStax Cassandra and Solr Search clusters used by the GE Digital Predix platform.

RhinoSource reviewed the architecture, configuration and data model of the Predix DataStax Enterprise clusters, investigated issues and assisted with benchmarking AWS storage alternative, making a number of tuning recommendations to improve cluster performance and reduce tombstone issues.

RhinoSource also reviewed cluster operational procedures and made recommendations to improve data consistency and read performance.

HERE Technologies is a global provider of digital mapping, location data and related automotive services to individual consumers and businesses.

HERE uses Cassandra as a high-performance metadata index within the HERE location data platform.

DataStax brought RhinoSource onsite to HERE to do a deep dive into their DataStax Enterprise Cassandra deployment to ensure best practices were being followed and to provide recommendations of how to better manage the DataStax environments to ensure SLAs would be met.

RhinoSource reviewed HERE’s existing DataStax architecture, cluster configurations, security settings, use cases, query patterns and Cassandra data model, and made detailed tuning recommendations that would improve consistency, performance and stability to meet stringent multi-tenant high-availability and latency SLAs, as well as to prevent future problems.

RhinoSource also reviewed HERE’s cluster operational procedures and made recommendations to streamline cluster maintenance and disaster recovery procedures, including using DataStax OpsCenter for cluster monitoring, automated backup & restore and ongoing cluster repair.

Finally, RhinoSource provided guidelines to the HERE team for the use of Docker within DataStax Enterprise production and development environments, including configuration approaches to prevent data from being lost when containers are removed.

ADT Inc. provides residential, small and large business electronic security, fire protection, and other related alarm monitoring services throughout the United States.

ADT Pulse is ADT’s high-end home security and home automation service used by millions of customers that combines the company's alarm and security service with home automation and live stream video.

iControl Networks (now part of Alarm.com) built and provides operational support for the software system that is the foundation of ADT Pulse.

As adoption of the home security product and total data sizes grew, RhinoSource advised iControl Networks engineering and IT support teams on database scaling, performance tuning and coding best practices, enabling them to secure top cable and home security companies as customers.

Planning for web-scale data sizes, RhinoSource educated the iControl team on NoSQL architectures and designed a high-performance Apache Kafka and DataStax Cassandra IoT architecture for cost-effectively capturing and storing hundreds of terabytes of IoT sensor data from millions of homes.

RhinoSource designed the Cassandra schemas and worked with iControl’s engineering team to port the application to use Cassandra for data storage and Kafka for streaming, allowing simultaneous dual-writes to the legacy Oracle database and Cassandra in the Cloud for Zero Downtime Data Migration.

RhinoSource developed DevOps scripting and deployed the new Cloud architecture on Amazon AWS for development, load & stress testing and production environments. Using AWS, RhinoSource conducted comparative load & stress testing to demonstrate that Cassandra-backed performance exceeded the performance of the legacy Oracle architecture, while providing linear scalability and active-active data centers at a small fraction of the cost.

RhinoSource continues to support application quality assurance and performance tuning efforts as new features are added to the iControl application and as database upgrades are released and applied at their largest customer sites.

The California Department of Justice (DOJ) chose DataStax Enterprise Cassandra to be a scalable data storage platform for its Stop Data Collection system, which was developed to meet the requirements of the California Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) of 2015 (AB 953).

DataStax brought RhinoSource onsite to the California DOJ to review the DataStax Enterprise system architecture, network, security, expected workloads, data models, code, disaster recovery and operational procedures to help the DOJ team accelerate the development and prepare for the release of the RIPA Stop Data Collection platform.

After a deep dive into the DOJ architecture, data model and code, RhinoSource made recommendations to improve cluster and query performance and addressed tombstone issues discovered in some of the production tables.

RhinoSource also provided guidance and best practices to the California DOJ team for using OpsCenter to manage and monitor DataStax Enterprise clusters, including the configuration of backup & recovery and the ongoing cluster repair process.

Finally, RhinoSource provided examples of how to use Solr and Spark Analytics to improve application response times, recommended a process for testing cluster tuning changes and provided a role-based training plan for DOJ team members to improve their working DataStax knowledge.

Element Fleet (TSX: EFN), the largest fleet management company in North America with a global reach, provides comprehensive fleet management that provides unmatched economies of scale and insight that improves the financial and operational value of vehicle fleets worldwide.

Element Fleet chose DataStax Enterprise Cassandra, Solr Search, Spark Analytics and DSE Graph for the ingestion and storage of real-time IoT data streams such as vehicle telematics, weather and traffic data that power their vehicle telematics and fleet management analytics services.

In preparation for go-live, DataStax brought RhinoSource into Element Fleet to do a health checkup and review their DataStax Enterprise Cassandra, Solr Search and Spark Analytics uses cases, architecture, data models, configurations and cluster management operations to ensure they were prepared for the production launch of their real-time vehicle telematics and analytics application.

RhinoSource made important tuning and operational recommendations to bring Element’s DataStax Enterprise implementation in line with best practices.

RhinoSource also helped the Element team optimize data batch loading performance while maintaining cross-datacenter consistency, and provided best practices for handling batch job failures and reloads. This included recommendations for monitoring and alerting using OpsCenter to maximize cluster stability during the heavy batch write workloads.

Finally, RhinoSource provided advice and sample code for handling retry scenarios for both streaming ingests and bulk loads.