T-Mobile DataStax Distributed Data Systems Operational Support

T-Mobile US is an American wireless network operator with one of America's largest and fastest telecom and 5G networks, which has revolutionized the telecom and internet sectors through continuous innovation and by launching new products and services.

T-Mobile uses DataStax Enterprise Cassandra as a high-performance, horizontally-scalable real-time data store behind some of its most critical customer-facing systems. At that position in the stack, security posture and recovery capability are not separable from performance.

DataStax brought RhinoSource into T-Mobile to assist with operational support for those DataStax Enterprise Cassandra clusters, and with security and backup and recovery setup. RhinoSource reviewed the 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 for the DataStax Enterprise clusters to meet stringent enterprise security requirements, assisted with testing of node and data center failure and recovery scenarios, and investigated cluster replication and gossip issues — making the recommendations that resolved what was found.

RhinoSource then coached the T-Mobile ops team through cluster maintenance and node operations, general performance tuning and data export/import, and educated the team on anti-patterns. We 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 OpsCenter dashboards and proactive alerts.