This talk is part of Cerner's Tech Talk series. Check us out at http://engineering.cerner.com/ and @CernerEng Apache Cassandra is a popular choice for a wide variety of application persistence needs. There are many design choices that can effect uptime and performance. In this talk we'll look at some of the many things to consider from a single server to multiple data centers. Basic understanding of Cassandra features coupled with client driver features can be a very powerful combination. This talk will be an introduction but will deep dive into the technical details of how Cassandra works. About the Speaker: Patrick McFadin (@PatrickMcFadin) is the Chief Evangelist at DataStax, the leading distributor of Apache Cassandra. Cassandra is a widely used open source NoSQL database created at Facebook and used at companies like Netflix, eBay, and Twitter. McFadin has a lot of experience with open source and Cassandra. Prior to DataStax, McFadin was the Chief Architect for Hobsons where he used Cassandra extensively.