title: Does Cassandra support sharding?
body: <p>Does <a href="http://cassandra.apache.org/">Apache Cassandra</a> support sharding?</p>
  
  <p>Apologize that this question must seem trivial, but I cannot seem to find the answer. I have read that Cassandra was partially modeled after GAE's Big Table which shards on a massive scale. But most of the documentation I'm currently finding on Cassandra seems to imply that Cassandra does not partition data horizontally across multiple machines, but rather supports many many duplicate machines. This would imply that Cassandra is a good fit high availability reads, but would eventually break down if the write volume became very very high. </p>