Microsoft has essentially copied the Cassandra approach for it's Table Storage. See here:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/azure/AzureStorage.aspx It is I believe a compliment of sorts, in the sense that it is a validation of the Cassandra approach. The reason I know about this is that I attended a presentation about Azure last week, and one of the Azure team told us all about it. The Table Storage is essentially Cassandra; although I guess reimplemented. That said it would have been better for them to actually use Cassandra and commit development effort to help the project than simply reimplement. Given their desire to promote Azure as a platform for open source applications I would have thought this would be a no brainer.
