Datastax Cassandra Amazon EC2 - Storage Space

Question

We are planing to use Datastax provided amazon AMI EC2 instance to run Cassandra.

We planing to launch an instance(Datastax AMI) with following configuration

m3.large (6.5 ECUs, 2 vCPUs, 2.5 GHz, Intel Xeon E5-2670v2, 7.5 GiB memory, 1 x 32 GiB Storage Capacity).

Please note that this 32GB is instance storage not a EBS volume.

As mentioned above, if we choose that instance, our application can store upto 32GB.

My Question is, Our application is huge and likely to store more than 100GB. In that cases, How can I expand the storage space?.

As I am new to cassandra, I am unable to understand Amazon documention and Datastax documention.

Please help me.

Thanks

Answer 1

The Datastax Amazon AMI will create a RAID0 array (total storage is the sum of all the disks) if there are multiple disks available at the first boot of the instance, but that requires choosing an instance type that has multiple instance store disks.

That leaves a few options:

1. Pick a different instance type that has more storage. The r3 family may work, unless you really need to use an m3.large for some reason.
2. Increase storage by adding more nodes to the ring (not likely to be cost effective)
3. Don't use the Datastax AMI. Use an Ubuntu AMI (the Datastax AMI is built on Ubuntu) and install all the required software (Java, DSE, etc.) some other way. Then you can use an m3.large (or any other instance type) but use an EBS volume of any size for storage.