The text discusses the enhancements in Apache Cassandra version 2.1, particularly focusing on read and write performance improvements. It mentions a 75% increase in read performance compared to CQL 2.0 and a 160% increase over Thrift. Write performance also saw a significant boost of 95% over CQL 2.0 and 150% over Thrift. However, the write performance is inconsistent due to commitlog disk being the bottleneck on a 32-core VM. The team plans to prioritize commitlog compression and support for multiple commitlog volumes to address this issue.