[marginalia_nu]

You can still do primary/stand-by replication.

If you actually crunch the numbers, you'll see that the likelihood of multiple node simultaneous failure of a larger cluster is actually often as high, or higher than the likelihood of a single node failure on a non-distributed application.

Despite running redundant distributed set-ups, services today really don't have particularly spectacular availability. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github; all go down or brown out frequently.