Deep storage is where segments are stored. It is a storage mechanism that Druid does not provide. This deep storage infrastructure defines the level of durability of your data, as long as Druid nodes can see this storage infrastructure and get at the segments stored on it, you will not lose data no matter how many Druid nodes you lose. If segments disappear from this storage layer, then you will lose whatever data those segments represented.
A local mount can be used for storage of segments as well. This allows you to use just your local file system or anything else that can be mount locally like NFS, Ceph, etc. This is the default deep storage implementation.
Note that you should generally set `druid.storage.storageDirectory` to something different from `druid.segmentCache.locations` and `druid.segmentCache.infoDir`.
[Apache Cassandra](http://www.datastax.com/what-we-offer/products-services/datastax-enterprise/apache-cassandra) can also be leveraged for deep storage. This requires some additional druid configuration as well as setting up the necessary schema within a Cassandra keystore.
Please note that this is a community contributed module and does not support Cassandra 2.x or hadoop-based batch indexing. For more information on using Cassandra as deep storage, see [Cassandra Deep Storage](Cassandra-Deep-Storage.html).