Cassandra multidatacenter configuration with 1 external ip

You can index collection types in cassandra 2.1 and later. You are after:
SELECT * FROM <table> WHERE <field> CONTAINS <value_in_list/map/set>

Detailed example:

cqlsh> USE ks;
cqlsh:ks> CREATE TABLE data_points (
            id text PRIMARY KEY,
            created_at timestamp,
            previous_event_id varchar,
            properties map<text,text>
         );
cqlsh:ks> create index on data_points (properties);
cqlsh:ks> INSERT INTO data_points (id, properties) VALUES ('1', { 'fruit' : 'apple', 'band' : 'Beatles' });
cqlsh:ks> INSERT INTO data_points (id, properties) VALUES ('2', { 'fruit' : 'cherry', 'band' : 'Beatles' });
cqlsh:ks> SELECT * FROM data_points WHERE properties CONTAINS 'Beatles';

 id | created_at | previous_event_id | properties
----+------------+-------------------+----------------------------------------
  2 |       null |              null | {'band': 'Beatles', 'fruit': 'cherry'}
  1 |       null |              null |  {'band': 'Beatles', 'fruit': 'apple'}

(2 rows)

Word of warning, secondary indexes don't scale out well as they use a scatter/gather algorithm to find what you need, if you plan to use them for heavy tagging it might be better to denormalize the properties field int a separate table and carry out multiple queries.

Further reading:

• Is it possible to use cql to query collections in a row?

The Hadoop Support section of the Cassandra Wiki says:

Cassandra's Hadoop support implements the same interface as HDFS to achieve input data locality (see cluster configuration for details on data locality and how to split your analytic and realtime read loads).

So the answer appears to be, "yes".