Hadoop and HBase were developed to run commodity hardware so that we can have hundreds of commodity machines and configure a Hadoop/HBase cluster. As data becomes costlier or important, we prefer some good machines so as to provide a robust cluster operation.

We have two scenarios—one in which we have many low-end machines, and another in which we have less number of machines for a cluster to be configured. In the first scenario, what we can do is set the replication factor more as we have many machines with storage and memory, and by setting a higher replication of data, we can make sure that data is available even if a machine fails frequently. For this scenario, we must have a good configuration machine that hosts NameNode, because it's a crucial component of the cluster and a proper back-up plan for metadata. In the second scenario, we might have less number of machines, so it is suggested that these machines must be well configured.

The following table shows...