I think this is a misunderstanding in terminology. "Network partition" in this context does not necessarily mean your LAN cable is broken, it means that you have a cluster of servers that expect to communicate, and some of them cannot communicate between each other.
That could be because of a faulty network, but it could also be due to hardware failures, misconfiguration, slowness of servers (hard to tell from not reachable), and a whole host of other causes. If you have more than just a couple of servers, this will happen sooner or later.
If you only have a couple of servers, IMHO don't bother with a truly distributed system, use a database with failover to a replication slave (lazy or eager, depending on what consistency you need) and be done with it.
Comments
I think this is a misunderstanding in terminology. "Network partition" in this context does not necessarily mean your LAN cable is broken, it means that you have a cluster of servers that expect to communicate, and some of them cannot communicate between each other.
That could be because of a faulty network, but it could also be due to hardware failures, misconfiguration, slowness of servers (hard to tell from not reachable), and a whole host of other causes. If you have more than just a couple of servers, this will happen sooner or later.
If you only have a couple of servers, IMHO don't bother with a truly distributed system, use a database with failover to a replication slave (lazy or eager, depending on what consistency you need) and be done with it.