Note that Robert Yokota's addendum[1] points out that HBase "cannot achieve both consistency and availability." His earlier results did not take into account that HBase clients continuously retry failed ops. (According to Nicolas Liochon, upon its death a server's regions are moved to another node.) Failures start rolling in once network partition(s) extend beyond the configured timeout. Kyle [2] was not impressed:
"During the network partition, no requests are successful" is not the best result for a CP system, IMO."
HBase should provide partial availability in the face partitions.