I am yet to try Hector, but am involved in latest Kundera 2.0.1 release. I suggest you give it a try. It has gone a major change since its inception and you can see a lot of new features getting added and bugs being fixed. Currently it supports JPA 1.0 and Cassandra 0.7.6 but we are planning to add support for Cassandra 0.8 and JPA 2.0 very soon. There is a pretty good example here: https://github.com/impetus-opensource/Kundera/wiki/Getting-started that may help you get started.
