Western Union DataStax Enterprise Cloud Architecture Design

Western Union makes financial services accessible to people everywhere, building products and services that bridge digital and physical to give customers choice, security and reliability wherever they are.

The 172-year-old remittances company is transforming its digital infrastructure to compete in the 21st Century. That architectural renovation includes scripted deployments of right-sized DataStax Enterprise Cassandra, Solr Search, Spark Analytics, DSE Graph and OpsCenter clusters on Amazon Web Services, using blueprint templates fitted to each application's specific use case requirements.

DataStax engaged RhinoSource to review Western Union's application data models and access paths, and to recommend the proper use of DSE features — TTL, Solr indexes, Spark Analytics and Kafka integration — that would keep those applications efficient, scalable and capable of meeting the business's SLAs.

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

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

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