Now that you're acquainted with Cassandra's substantial powers, you're no doubt chomping at the bit to try it out. Happily, Cassandra is free, open source, and very easy to get running:
Since some of the features are specific to Cassandra 3.0, we will be installing the latest version of Cassandra 3.0.x available for each OS. Also since it is easier to add apt and yum repositories from DataStax, we will be using the DataStax Community version of Cassandra wherever possible. DataStax Community is open source Apache Cassandra with a few added features.