Ah, the interwebs, a land of broken links. Since this was posted SDForum has morphed into SVForum, replaced the technology serving up their site, and deleted at least some historical content. A version of the slides that prompted this post may be found (for now, at least) at http://www.slideshare.net/jhammerb/data-presentations-cassandra-sigmod/ where the diagram mentioned appears on slide 16.