BNSF Railway Transportation Management DataStax Architecture Review

BNSF Railway Co. is one of the largest freight railroads in North America. One of six North American Class I railroads, BNSF has 35,000 employees, 32,500 miles of track in 28 states and nearly 8,000 locomotives, with three transcontinental routes connecting the western and eastern United States.

BNSF was working to improve its mission critical transportation management applications by moving them onto DataStax Enterprise Cassandra and DSE Graph as a high-performance, horizontally scalable storage backend. At that scale the question is rarely whether the technology can hold the data — it is whether the deployment will hold the SLA.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into BNSF Railway to review the DataStax Enterprise infrastructure and assess its ability to meet those system SLAs.

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

We then presented best practices to BNSF's DataStax Enterprise system administrators and developers, and helped the team identify where DSE Graph was the right tool for the use cases in front of them.