White Paper: Evaluating Apache Cassandra as a Cloud Database

The amount of information that currently resides only in the cloud is small, but that’s about to change. A recent study by IT industry analyst group IDC estimates that cloud computing accounts for less than 2 percent of IT spending today, but by 2015, nearly 20 percent of all information will be “touched” (stored or processed) in a cloud. Moreover, IDC predicts that by that same year, as much as 10 percent of all data will be maintained in a cloud.

Despite this growing movement toward cloud computing, some IT professionals remain standoffish toward the idea of porting a company’s data onto a public cloud computing platform such as Amazon, Rackspace, and others. This position is understandable, given the current confusion over whether running a database in a cloud environment actually delivers tangible benefits – technical and otherwise –over keeping that same data on-premise.

Whether deciding to move a small or significant amount of data to a cloud database, today’s IT decision-makers need to understand whether the solution they’re considering is designed and/or implemented in a way that utilizes all the benefits and promises of cloud computing. This paper examines those key characteristics and discusses how Apache Cassandra™ stacks up from an evaluation perspective.

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