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Introduction

As AI adoption accelerates across industries, businesses face an undeniable truth — AI is only as powerful as the data that fuels it. To truly harness AI’s potential, organizations must effectively manage, store, and process high-scale data while ensuring cost efficiency, resilience, performance and operational agility. 

At Cisco Support Case Management – IT, we confronted this challenge head-on. Our team delivers a centralized IT platform that manages the entire lifecycle of Cisco product and service cases. Our mission is to provide customers with the fastest and most effective case resolution, leveraging best-in-class technologies and AI-driven automation. We achieve this while maintaining a platform that is highly scalable, highly available, and cost-efficient. To deliver the best possible customer experience, we must efficiently store and process massive volumes of growing data. This data fuels and trains our AI models, which power critical automation solutions to deliver faster and more accurate resolutions. Our biggest challenge was striking the right balance between building a highly scalable and reliable database cluster while ensuring cost and operational efficiency. 

Traditional approaches to high availability often rely on separate clusters per datacenter, leading to significant costs, not just for the initial setup but to maintain and manage the data replication process and high availability. However, AI workloads demand real-time data access, rapid processing, and uninterrupted availability, something legacy architectures struggle to deliver. 

So, how do you architect a multi-datacenter infrastructure that can persist and process massive data to support AI and data-intensive workloads, all while keeping operational costs low? That’s exactly the challenge our team set out to solve. 

In this blog, we’ll explore how we built an intelligent, scalable, and AI-ready data infrastructure that enables real-time decision-making, optimizes resource utilization, reduces costs and redefines operational efficiency. 

Rethinking AI-ready case management at scale

In today’s AI-driven world, customer support is no longer just about resolving cases, it’s about continuously learning and automating to make resolution faster and better while efficiently handling the cost and operational agility.  

The same rich dataset that powers case management must also fuel AI models and automation workflows, reducing case resolution time from hours or days to mere minutes, which helps in increased customer satisfaction. 

This created a fundamental challenge: decoupling the primary database that serves mainstream case management transactional system from an AI-ready, search-friendly database, a necessity for scaling automation without overburdening the core platform. While the idea made perfect sense, it introduced two major concerns: cost and scalability. As AI workloads grow, so does the amount of data. Managing this ever-expanding dataset while ensuring high performance, resilience, and minimal manual intervention during outages required an entirely new approach. 

Rather than following the traditional model of deploying separate database clusters per data center for high availability, we took a bold step toward building a single stretched database cluster spanning multiple data centers. This architecture not only optimized resource utilization and reduced both initial and maintenance costs but also ensured seamless data availability. 

By rethinking traditional index database infrastructure models, we redefined AI-powered automation for Cisco case management, paving the way for faster, smarter, and more cost-effective support solutions. 

How we solved it – The technology foundation

Building a multi-data center modern index database cluster required a robust technological foundation, capable of handling high-scale data processing, ultra-low latency for faster data replication, and careful design approach to build a fault-tolerance to support high availability without compromising performance, or cost-efficiency. 

Network Requirements

A key challenge in stretching an index database cluster across multiple data centers is network performance. Traditional high availability architectures rely on separate clusters per data center, often struggling with data replication, latency, and synchronization bottlenecks. To begin with, we conducted a detailed network assessment across our Cisco data centers focusing on: 

• Latency and bandwidth requirements – Our AI-powered automation workloads demand real-time data access. We analyzed latency and bandwidth between two separate data centers to determine if a stretched cluster was viable.  
• Capacity planning – We assessed our expected data growth, AI query patterns, and indexing rates to ensure that the infrastructure could scale efficiently. 
• Resiliency and failover readiness – The network needed to handle automated failovers, ensuring uninterrupted data availability, even during outages. 

How Cisco’s high-performance data center paved the way

Cisco’s high-performance data center networking laid a strong foundation for building the multi-data center stretch single database cluster. The latency and bandwidth provided by Cisco data centers exceeded our expectation to confidently move on to the next step of designing a stretch cluster. Our implementation leveraged:

• Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – Offered a policy-driven, software-defined network, ensuring optimized routing, low-latency communication, and workload-aware traffic management between data centers.  
• Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Nexus 9000 Switches – Enabled high-throughput, resilient, and dynamically scalable interconnectivity, crucial for quick data synchronization across data centers. 

The Cisco data center and networking technology made this possible. It empowered Cisco IT to take this idea forward and enabled us to build this successful cluster which saves significant costs and provides high operational efficiency.

Our implementation – The multi-data center stretch cluster leveraging Cisco data center and network power

With the right network infrastructure in place, we set out to build a highly available, scalable, and AI-optimized database cluster spanning multiple data centers.

Cisco multi-data center stretch Index database cluster

Key design decisions

• Single logical, multi-data center cluster for real-time AI-driven automation – Instead of maintaining separate clusters per data center which doubles costs, increases maintenance efforts, and demands significant manual intervention, we built a stretched cluster across multiple data centers. This design leverages Cisco’s exceptionally powerful data center network, enabling seamless data synchronization and supporting real-time AI-driven automation with improved efficiency and scalability.  
• Intelligent data placement and synchronization – We strategically position data nodes across multiple data centers using custom data allocation policies to ensure each data center maintains a unique copy of the data, enhancing high availability and fault tolerance. Additionally, locally attached storage disks on virtual machines enable faster data synchronization, leveraging Cisco’s robust data center capabilities to achieve minimal latency. This approach optimizes both performance and cost-efficiency while ensuring data resilience for AI models and critical workloads. This approach helps in faster AI-driven queries, reducing data retrieval latencies for automation workflows. 
• Automated failover and high availability – With a single cluster stretched across multiple data centers, failover occurs automatically due to the cluster’s inherent fault tolerance. In the event of virtual machine, node, or data center outages, traffic is seamlessly rerouted to available nodes or data centers with minimal to no human intervention. This is made possible by the robust network capabilities of Cisco’s data centers, enabling data synchronization in less than 5 milliseconds for minimal disruption and maximum uptime. 

Results

By implementing these AI-focused optimizations, we ensured that the case management system could power automation at scale, reduce resolution time, and maintain resilience and efficiency. The results were realized quickly.

• Faster case resolution: Reduced resolution time from hours/days to just minutes by enabling real-time AI-powered automation. 
• Cost savings: Eliminated redundant clusters, cutting infrastructure costs while improving resource utilization.  
  • Infrastructure cost reduction: 50% savings per quarter by limiting it to one single-stretch cluster, by completing eliminating a separate backup cluster. 
  • License cost reduction: 50% savings per quarter as the licensing is required just for one cluster. 
• Seamless AI model training and automation workflows: Provided scalable, high-performance indexing for continuous AI learning and automation improvements. 
• High resilience and minimal downtime: Automated failovers ensured 99.99% availability, even during maintenance or network disruptions. 
• Future-ready scalability: Designed to handle growing AI workloads, ensuring that as data scales, the infrastructure remains efficient and cost-effective.

By rethinking traditional high availability strategies and leveraging Cisco’s cutting-edge data center technology, we created a next-gen case management platform—one that’s smarter, faster, and AI-driven.

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The CDC team responsible for aggregating and disseminating best practices around contraception has been cut.

Liudmila Chernetska/iStockphoto/Getty Images

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Liudmila Chernetska/iStockphoto/Getty Images

To most people, the eight-person team was indistinguishable from the hundreds of other scientists and researchers cut in April during the mass firings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But for many clinicians who specialize in women’s health, losing the team responsible for the CDC’s contraception guidelines was a devastating blow to women’s health.

“ I just remember feeling like — of all the things — I think contraception shouldn’t be controversial,” says Dr. Angeline Ti, a family physician in the Atlanta, Georgia area who specializes in reproductive healthcare.

The team was responsible for aggregating and disseminating best practices around contraception in a set of guidelines called U.S. Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use.

“I knew that things were gonna happen at CDC, but I thought that these guidelines were so important,” says Ti. She says she uses the guidelines “pretty much every time” she sees a patient for contraceptive care.

Other doctors describe feeling equally shocked. “I mean, there is no other resource that is doing this,” says Dr. Andrea Braden, an obstetrician in Atlanta, Georgia. “All the OB-GYN’s use it.”

Representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Trump administration did not explain why the CDC team was cut. It was eliminated in April as part of the reduction of the Women’s Health and Fertility Branch of the Division of Reproductive Health.

NPR reached out to HHS for comment on this story, but did not receive a response.

 An indispensable app

Busy doctors who are seeing many patients, says Braden, simply do not have time to comb through all the latest medical research. So, the CDC team made recommendations available in an app that doctors could download and easily reference with questions about contraception, including how to navigate the topic for patients with specific conditions and diseases. It was downloaded 440,000 times, according to the CDC.

“The app was just a game changer for us,” says Braden. “That was very clearly organized, really easy to digest, and it was such a nice quick reference for us. It was a resource that we all trusted intuitively.”

The current guidelines are still accessible, while the team charged with updating them no longer exists.

Doctors caution that even though the recommendations were issued relatively recently, without careful monitoring they will soon be out of date. “ Medicine is not static,” says Dr. Deva Sharma, a hematologist who said the guidelines are a critical part of her medical practice. “It’s constantly evolving and improving.”

The team issued guidelines most recently in 2024. One example of a change that Braden says had a significant impact on her conversations with her patients is around recommendations for breastfeeding mothers using birth control. The new guidelines for the first time acknowledged that some contraception can jeopardize milk supply in nursing mothers.

This update, she says, represented a sea change in a way of thinking about the importance of empowering patients to make their own decisions about breastfeeding. “ That was such an important aspect of the update,” says Braden. “It helped us guide our practice, rather than tell people what they need after they have a baby. It really put the patient at the center of the conversation.”

For some patients and doctors dealing with specific conditions, conversations about contraception can be matters of life or death. Sharma specializes in treating women with Sickle Cell disease — an inherited red blood cell disorder — which puts patients at a much greater risk of life threatening complications in pregnancy than people without the disease.

Sharma calls the termination of the CDC team “detrimental to women’s health,” and also recalls vividly the moment she found out when a colleague sent her a message. “I remember just feeling overwhelmed and devastated,” says Sharma.

In the recent guidelines, the CDC team changed recommendations for women with Sickle Cell Disease, which already puts patients at increased risk for blood clots. Doctors who treat this disease say they now rarely prescribe certain forms of contraception to their patients due to new evidence suggesting these kinds of treatments can create an even greater risk.

Braden says she is still feeling confused as to why such a valuable resource was eliminated. “ I don’t understand,” she says “Why them? Why this sector of medicine? This is a waste.”

She warns that doctors will not be able to compensate for the medical updates that this guide provides. “ Medicine changes so quickly and it is very difficult to keep up with all of it,” she warns. “New data comes out — new research comes out — and we find out that there’s a better way to do things. Contraceptive medicine is no different from that.”

Missing treatment options are hard to measure 

Many patients will not necessarily know about medical updates they do not benefit from, but Teonna Woolford is one patient who does understand the utility of the CDC’s guidelines around contraception.

Born with Sickle Cell Disease, Woolford started a non-profit, Sickle Cell Reproductive Education Directive, that advocates for patients like herself. Woolford says the disease is often characterized by uncertainty and difficulty in making hard decisions around treatment.

“Having the guidelines was really like a proactive approach to addressing contraception,” says Woolford. “There are a lot of knowledge and research gaps on this subject.”

Sickle Cell Disease disproportionately affects people of color, a group that Woolford notes has not historically enjoyed parity in reproductive justice. “The removal of the CDC team to me just reminds me of darker times in our history when people of color were oppressed,” she says.

Black women in the United States have disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality.

Dr. Braden sees the team’s elimination as a setback to women everywhere. “It really hurts those of us in women’s health — to target something like contraceptives.” says Braden. “This is basic healthcare for OBGYNs and it was really defeating. I would say I felt angry and sad and confused.”

She and other doctors point out that many women in the U.S. can no longer legally terminate pregnancy. They say that makes it especially important for them to be able to make an informed choice about the best ways to prevent becoming pregnant in the first place.

“ Bodily autonomy has been taken away from women in various states,” says Dr. Sharma, who practices in Tennessee — a state with strict abortion laws. “We’ve slashed people’s rights to make decisions,” she says. “Now we’re taking away evidence-based recommendations.”