We do not need any large hardware in Kafka, because it is capable of handling high-velocity and high-volume data. Moreover, it can also support message throughput of thousands of messages per second.
Kafka can easily handle these messages with the very low latency of the range of milliseconds, demanded by most of the new use cases.
Kafka is resistant to node/machine failure within a cluster.
As Kafka supports messages replication, so, messages are never lost. It is one of the reasons behind durability.
Kafka can be scaled-out, without incurring any downtime on the fly by adding additional nodes.
Hope this helps