I wanted to let everyone know that we're expanding our beta for the Acunu Storage Platform, which comprises a modified version of Cassandra that interfaces directly on to a storage stack reengineered for "Big Data" workloads.
Acunu runs Cassandra applications unmodified, but provides (as we'll be talking about on our blog in the coming weeks) higher, more predictable performance, automated tiering over SSDs, very fast rebuild from disk failure, and space-efficient clones of ColumnFamilies, among many other things. We also have a suite of Cassandra cluster deployment, management and monitoring tools. Cassandra's a great project, and we have a lot of patches we've started contributing back to the community. We'll be open sourcing our storage stack, too. Please get in touch if you're interested in putting it through its paces! Tim -- http://www.acunu.com | @acunu