Nowadays, most business operations depend directly on the applications and as a result — on their IT infrastructure. Therefore, providing 24/7/365 uptime and high availability for the applications is a definite way to ensure smooth business operation. Clustering mechanisms are designed to fulfill these goals, however, you need more than half of the nodes to keep the cluster up and running. For a storage cluster, to ensure proper nodes communication, an effective and simple way is to use redundant heartbeat connections. Nonetheless, this is not always an option, especially for geographically distributed clusters. To overcome these limitations, a Node Majority mechanism was introduced.
