Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/DataStax/datastax-distributing-the-enterprise-safely-thomas-valley-cassandra-summit-2016 | Distributed systems like Cassandra provide significant opportunity for fault tolerance, reliability and continuous uptime. Frequently, what it really takes to ensure this degree of uptime is greatly misunderstood, or under rated. Often, enterprises do not understand or prepare for failure until it happens, which clearly is too late. Talk to cover the following topics: -Why do I need to prepare for failure -What should I be operationally testing -Understanding failure scenarios -Understanding time to recovery -Capacity planning for failure -Multi-Data Center considerations -But it's distributed, why do I need to backup? About the Speaker Thomas Valley Solutions Engineer, DataStax Thom Valley is a Solutions Engineer at DataStax Inc. Immediately after graduating with a degree in English and Theatre, Thom went to work for his first software company, installing systems and training users at beverage distribution companies nationwide. From there he moved on to more challenging roles in a range of industries including; Director of R&D for a web publishing startup, CTO of an e-commerce and fulfillment company and COO of an smart cities / IOT provider.