Cassandra is the only NOSQL datastore I’m aware of, which is scalable, distributed, self replicating, eventually consistent, schema-less key-value store running on java which doesn’t have a single point of failure. HBase could also match most of these requirements, but Cassandra is easier to manage due to its tiny footprint.
The one thing Cassandra doesn’t do [...]

Last year Dealnews.com unexpectedly got listed on the front page of yahoo.com for a couple of hours. No matter how optimistic one is, unexpected events like these can take down a regular website with almost no effort at all. What is your plan if you get slashdotted ? Are you ok with a short outage [...]