Answering your question about clients - Hector essentially provides access to the Cassandra native API (columns, column families, rows etc) whereas Kundera aims to hide these details and provide object-database mapping.
Kundera therefore probably makes it easier to quickly persist a range of Java objects into Cassandra - but may not provide an efficient mapping, perhaps losing some of the performance that noSQL approaches provide.
Hector expects you to adapt to the Cassandra data model - this will be harder work, but is likely to deliver more performance.
