Scaling HBASE *down* instead of *up*

Question

I know that you can launch hbase in non-distributed mode. It's not clear from my reading whether it's practical to use it in production for a range from one node through a few up to a full-fledged cluster. The alternative would be to abstract out an interface and toss in something simpler in the small case(s). Has anyone out there experience in deploying hbase on the low end of the scaling spectrum?

Answer 1

We started out in production with 4 nodes without problems, and have since scaled up to about 50 as our data grew.

I don't see any reason in theory why you couldn't run everything on a single node, so long as it had plenty of resources ( see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3727535/can-hbase-mapreduce-and-hdfs-can-work-on-a-single-machine-having-hdoop-installe ), though I'm not aware of anyone who started that small.