Introduction
As AI adoption accelerates throughout industries, companies face an simple fact — AI is barely as highly effective as the information that fuels it. To actually harness AI’s potential, organizations should successfully handle, retailer, and course of high-scale knowledge whereas guaranteeing price effectivity, resilience, efficiency and operational agility.
At Cisco Help Case Administration – IT, we confronted this problem head-on. Our workforce delivers a centralized IT platform that manages the complete lifecycle of Cisco product and repair instances. Our mission is to supply prospects with the quickest and handiest case decision, leveraging best-in-class applied sciences and AI-driven automation. We obtain this whereas sustaining a platform that’s extremely scalable, extremely obtainable, and cost-efficient. To ship the absolute best buyer expertise, we should effectively retailer and course of huge volumes of rising knowledge. This knowledge fuels and trains our AI fashions, which energy essential automation options to ship quicker and extra correct resolutions. Our largest problem was putting the proper steadiness between constructing a extremely scalable and dependable database cluster whereas guaranteeing price and operational effectivity.
Conventional approaches to excessive availability usually depend on separate clusters per datacenter, resulting in important prices, not only for the preliminary setup however to keep up and handle the information replication course of and excessive availability. Nevertheless, AI workloads demand real-time knowledge entry, speedy processing, and uninterrupted availability, one thing legacy architectures wrestle to ship.
So, how do you architect a multi-datacenter infrastructure that may persist and course of huge knowledge to assist AI and data-intensive workloads, all whereas conserving operational prices low? That’s precisely the problem our workforce got down to clear up.
On this weblog, we’ll discover how we constructed an clever, scalable, and AI-ready knowledge infrastructure that permits real-time decision-making, optimizes useful resource utilization, reduces prices and redefines operational effectivity.
Rethinking AI-ready case administration at scale
In in the present day’s AI-driven world, buyer assist is not nearly resolving instances, it’s about repeatedly studying and automating to make decision quicker and higher whereas effectively dealing with the fee and operational agility.
The identical wealthy dataset that powers case administration should additionally gas AI fashions and automation workflows, decreasing case decision time from hours or days to mere minutes, which helps in elevated buyer satisfaction.
This created a elementary problem: decoupling the first database that serves mainstream case administration transactional system from an AI-ready, search-friendly database, a necessity for scaling automation with out overburdening the core platform. Whereas the concept made good sense, it launched two main issues: price and scalability. As AI workloads develop, so does the quantity of information. Managing this ever-expanding dataset whereas guaranteeing excessive efficiency, resilience, and minimal guide intervention throughout outages required a completely new strategy.
Quite than following the normal mannequin of deploying separate database clusters per knowledge heart for top availability, we took a daring step towards constructing a single stretched database cluster spanning a number of knowledge facilities. This structure not solely optimized useful resource utilization and decreased each preliminary and upkeep prices but in addition ensured seamless knowledge availability.
By rethinking conventional index database infrastructure fashions, we redefined AI-powered automation for Cisco case administration, paving the way in which for quicker, smarter, and cheaper assist options.
How we solved it – The know-how basis
Constructing a multi-data heart trendy index database cluster required a strong technological basis, able to dealing with high-scale knowledge processing, ultra-low latency for quicker knowledge replication, and cautious design strategy to construct a fault-tolerance to assist excessive availability with out compromising efficiency, or cost-efficiency.
Community Necessities
A key problem in stretching an index database cluster throughout a number of knowledge facilities is community efficiency. Conventional excessive availability architectures depend on separate clusters per knowledge heart, usually battling knowledge replication, latency, and synchronization bottlenecks. To start with, we performed a detailed community evaluation throughout our Cisco knowledge facilities specializing in:
- Latency and bandwidth necessities – Our AI-powered automation workloads demand real-time knowledge entry. We analyzed latency and bandwidth between two separate knowledge facilities to find out if a stretched cluster was viable.
- Capability planning – We assessed our anticipated knowledge progress, AI question patterns, and indexing charges to make sure that the infrastructure might scale effectively.
- Resiliency and failover readiness – The community wanted to deal with automated failovers, guaranteeing uninterrupted knowledge availability, even throughout outages.
How Cisco’s high-performance knowledge heart paved the way in which
Cisco’s high-performance knowledge heart networking laid a powerful basis for constructing the multi-data heart stretch single database cluster. The latency and bandwidth offered by Cisco knowledge facilities exceeded our expectation to confidently transfer on to the subsequent step of designing a stretch cluster. Our implementation leveraged:
- Cisco Software Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – Provided a policy-driven, software-defined community, guaranteeing optimized routing, low-latency communication, and workload-aware visitors administration between knowledge facilities.
- Cisco Software Coverage Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Nexus 9000 Switches – Enabled high-throughput, resilient, and dynamically scalable interconnectivity, essential for fast knowledge synchronization throughout knowledge facilities.
The Cisco knowledge heart and networking know-how made this doable. It empowered Cisco IT to take this concept ahead and enabled us to construct this profitable cluster which saves important prices and supplies excessive operational effectivity.
Our implementation – The multi-data heart stretch cluster leveraging Cisco knowledge heart and community energy
With the proper community infrastructure in place, we got down to construct a extremely obtainable, scalable, and AI-optimized database cluster spanning a number of knowledge facilities.
Cisco multi-data heart stretch Index database cluster
Key design choices
- Single logical, multi-data heart cluster for real-time AI-driven automation – As a substitute of sustaining separate clusters per knowledge heart which doubles prices, will increase upkeep efforts, and calls for important guide intervention, we constructed a stretched cluster throughout a number of knowledge facilities. This design leverages Cisco’s exceptionally highly effective knowledge heart community, enabling seamless knowledge synchronization and supporting real-time AI-driven automation with improved effectivity and scalability.
- Clever knowledge placement and synchronization – We strategically place knowledge nodes throughout a number of knowledge facilities utilizing customized knowledge allocation insurance policies to make sure every knowledge heart maintains a novel copy of the information, enhancing excessive availability and fault tolerance. Moreover, regionally connected storage disks on digital machines allow quicker knowledge synchronization, leveraging Cisco’s strong knowledge heart capabilities to realize minimal latency. This strategy optimizes each efficiency and cost-efficiency whereas guaranteeing knowledge resilience for AI fashions and significant workloads. This strategy helps in quicker AI-driven queries, decreasing knowledge retrieval latencies for automation workflows.
- Automated failover and excessive availability – With a single cluster stretched throughout a number of knowledge facilities, failover happens routinely as a result of cluster’s inherent fault tolerance. Within the occasion of digital machine, node, or knowledge heart outages, visitors is seamlessly rerouted to obtainable nodes or knowledge facilities with minimal to no human intervention. That is made doable by the strong community capabilities of Cisco’s knowledge facilities, enabling knowledge synchronization in lower than 5 milliseconds for minimal disruption and most uptime.
Outcomes
By implementing these AI-focused optimizations, we ensured that the case administration system might energy automation at scale, cut back decision time, and preserve resilience and effectivity. The outcomes had been realized rapidly.
- Quicker case decision: Decreased decision time from hours/days to only minutes by enabling real-time AI-powered automation.
- Value financial savings: Eradicated redundant clusters, slicing infrastructure prices whereas bettering useful resource utilization.
- Infrastructure price discount: 50% financial savings per quarter by limiting it to 1 single-stretch cluster, by finishing eliminating a separate backup cluster.
- License price discount: 50% financial savings per quarter because the licensing is required only for one cluster.
- Seamless AI mannequin coaching and automation workflows: Offered scalable, high-performance indexing for steady AI studying and automation enhancements.
- Excessive resilience and minimal downtime: Automated failovers ensured 99.99% availability, even throughout upkeep or community disruptions.
- Future-ready scalability: Designed to deal with rising AI workloads, guaranteeing that as knowledge scales, the infrastructure stays environment friendly and cost-effective.
By rethinking conventional excessive availability methods and leveraging Cisco’s cutting-edge knowledge heart know-how, we created a next-gen case administration platform—one which’s smarter, quicker, and AI-driven.
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