What is the consequence of a high replication factor in Cassandra?

A high replication factor in Cassandra significantly enhances data availability and fault tolerance. This is because with a higher replication factor, multiple copies of the same data are stored on different nodes within the cluster. If one or more nodes fail, the data is still accessible from the replicas stored on other operational nodes. This redundancy safeguards against data loss and ensures that the system can still serve read and write requests even when some nodes are down.

Moreover, increasing the replication factor means that in case of node failures or maintenance, Cassandra can seamlessly reroute requests to available replicas. This capability is essential for maintaining service continuity in distributed systems. Therefore, the primary benefit of a higher replication factor is its direct contribution to a more resilient and available database architecture, which is a critical feature in production environments where uptime and data integrity are paramount.

While the other options may contain elements of truth related to specific scenarios, they do not accurately reflect the primary benefit of a high replication factor as clearly as the improvement in availability and fault tolerance does.