Production deployment planning

Production deployment planning requires knowledge of the initial volume of data to store and an estimate of the typical application workload.

The Cassandra 2.0 topic Planning a cluster deployment provides guidance for planning a DataStax Enterprise cluster. The following resources and guidelines are also recommended:

• The DataStax Enterprise Reference Architecture white paper.
• For EC2 deployments, see:
  • User guide in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Documentation
  • "EC2 clusters spanning multiple regions and availability zones" in the latest DataStax Enterprise documentation.
  • What is the story with AWS storage
  • Get in the Ring with Cassandra and EC2
• DataStax Enterprise requires a solid network layer. Although not required, jumbo frames are recommended to improve streaming performance during processes such as bootstrapping and repair.
• Hadoop and Solr nodes require their own nodes/disks and have specific hardware requirements. See Capacity Planning in the DataStax Enterprise Reference Architecture and the Hadoop and Solr documentation.
• DataStax neither supports nor recommends using Network Attached Storage (NAS) because of performances issues, such as network saturation, I/O overload, pending-task swamp, excessive memory usage, and disk contention.
• If using a firewall, make sure that nodes within a cluster can reach each other. See Configuring firewall port access.