title: How can Cassandra have no single point of failure when it has no master and data is not replicated but distributed?
body: <p>Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but the Apache Cassandra Wikipedia article says:</p>
  
  <p>"Every node in the cluster has the same role. There is no single point of failure. Data is distributed across the cluster (so each node contains different data), but there is no master as every node can service any request."</p>
  
  <p>How can each node contain different data, but there be no single point of failure? For instance, I would imagine that in this senario, if a node when down containing the record I was querying, then a different node would pickup that request, however, it would not have the data to satisfy it..since that data was on the node that went down..</p>
  
  <p>Can someone clear this up for me?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>