I've seen both sides but Cassandra does handle replication and bringing data back is a matter of bootstrapping a node to replace the downed node.
One thing to consider is availability zones and regions though. What happens if your entire cluster goes down in the case of a single datacenter going offline? From what I understand ec2 availability zones are equivalent to physical datacenters so going across availability zones will handle an entire datacenter going down. Regions are another level of safeguarding against this. Anyway, just some thoughts. Some considerations are also found in the Cloud section of this page: http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/CassandraHardware On Mar 9, 2011, at 9:57 AM, Sasha Dolgy wrote: > > well, this is what i'm getting at. why would you want to back it up if the > cluster is working properly? backup is silly.... ; ) > > On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 4:54 PM, William Oberman <ober...@civicscience.com> > wrote: > I'm considering similar issues right now. The problem with ephemeral storage > is I don't know an easy way to back it up, while on an EBS it's a simple > snapshot API call. > > Otherwise, I believe the performance of the ephemeral (certainly in the case > of large or greater, where you can RAID0 multiple disks) is way better than > EBS. > > will >