Cisco Systems Cloud Services DataStax Health Checkup and Performance Tuning

Cisco Systems is a global digital communications technology company that develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products.

Cisco chose DataStax Enterprise Cassandra to store very large distributed data sets for the configuration management and subscription renewal Cloud services used by its partners and customers. Active-active replication across multiple data centers, linear scalability, fault-tolerance and zero-downtime upgrades are the reasons Cassandra fits an always-on commerce platform.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into Cisco to review and thoroughly check the DataStax Enterprise Cassandra and Solr Search clusters — validating cluster health, fixing what was broken, and improving what was merely working.

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

Finally, RhinoSource provided a benchmarking methodology for determining maximum cluster i/o capacity, recommended hardware upgrades to bring the deployment in line with best practices, and delivered a detailed zero-downtime DataStax Enterprise upgrade procedure.