Verisk Risk Management Data Services DataStax Production Readiness Review

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.