Western Union DataStax Enterprise Cloud Architecture Design

Western Union (NYSE: WU) makes financial services accessible to people everywhere, by building and offering easy-to-use products and services that bridge digital and physical to give customers choice, security, and reliability, no matter where they are.

Western Union, the 172-year-old remittances company, is in the process of transforming its digital infrastructure to compete in the 21st Century. This major systems architectural renovation includes scripted deployments of right-sized DataStax Enterprise Cassandra, Solr Search, Spark Analytics, DSE Graph and OpsCenter clusters on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using blueprint templates that fit each application’s specific use case requirements.

DataStax engaged RhinoSource to review Western Union’s application data models and access paths and recommend the proper use of DSE features including TTL, Solr indexes, Spark Analytics and Kafka integration that would ensure that Western Union’s applications would be efficient, scalable and able to meet the business’s SLAs.

RhinoSource created a comprehensive set of DataStax Reference Architecture blueprints for Western Union, including AWS instance types and storage configuration recommendations, to allow DevOps automation to be created that would support multiple tiers of DSE service on AWS across the full Development, Test and Production application lifecycle: from simple, single-region Cassandra-only deployments to complex, multi-region Spark, Solr and DSE Graph deployments.

RhinoSource also delivered a comprehensive DSE runbook for the DataStax system administration team, including best practice procedures for cluster management and best use of OpsCenter across multiple datacenters.

Finally, RhinoSource assisted the Western Union application development team with design of DSE Graph schemas to support fraud detection use cases.