[thekozmo]

There is no magic behind Scylla, mainly lots of hard work, hundreds of years of engineering, based on the former C* design which is based on Dynamo/Bigtable.

The JVM is part of the problem, not all of it. The main issue is that it hides the hardware and makes tracing harder - instruction level and block level. At Scylla we strive for efficiency, every operation is tagged with a priority class for the CPU and I/O schedulers. Folks are welcome to read the blogs about those topic. Lots of details and hard work