Much of Cassandra's power lies in the fact that it is a distributed database: rather than storing all of your data on a single machine, it is designed to distribute data across multiple machines. A distributed architecture is hugely beneficial for scalability, since you're not bound by the hardware capacity of a single machine; if you need more storage or more processing power, you can simply add more nodes to your Cassandra cluster. It's also a boon for availability: by storing multiple copies of your data on multiple machines, Cassandra is resilient to the failure of a particular node.
The beauty of a distributed database such as Cassandra is that, as application developers, we rarely need to think about the ...
