"When a replica is down for an extended period of time, or the machine storing hinted handoffs for an unavailable replica goes down as well, replicas must synchronize from one-another. In this case, Cassandra and Riak implement a Dynamo-inspired process called anti-entropy. In anti-entropy, replicas exchange Merkle Trees to identify parts of their replicated key ranges which are out of sync. A Merkle tree is a hierarchical hash verification: if the hash over the entire keyspace is not the same between two replicas, they will exchange hashes of smaller and smaller portions of the replicated keyspace until the out-of-sync keys are identified. This approach reduces unnecessary data transfer between replicas which contain mostly similar data." http://www.aosabook.org/en/nosql.html
