Verisk Risk Management Data Services DataStax Production Readiness Review

Verisk Analytics is a multinational data analytics and risk assessment firm with customers in insurance, natural resources, financial services, government and risk management. Verisk uses proprietary data sets and industry expertise to provide predictive analytics and decision support 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 for a cluster health checkup, to confirm the Cassandra, Solr Search and Spark Analytics deployments were ready for go-live. RhinoSource conducted a thorough review of the 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 the testing of failed node recovery procedures, making tuning recommendations that greatly sped up data transfer and node recovery times. We also investigated specific Cassandra, Solr and Spark issues and recommended the changes that addressed the problems, eliminated errors and stabilized the production cluster.

Finally, RhinoSource helped resolve issues with DataStax OpsCenter monitoring agents and helped set up the OpsCenter repair service, backup/recovery service and the dashboards and alerts the team needed to proactively monitor the DSE cluster and keep it healthy.