Arbitration For Data Integrity in Serviceguard Clusters, July 2007

Arbitration for Data Integrity in Serviceguard Clusters
To Arbitrate or Not to Arbitrate
11
No Arbitration—Risks
When all is said and done, it may be very unlikely that intra-node
communication would be lost in the above configurations, but it is still
possible that heartbeat could disappear, with both nodes still running,
and this scenario can cause data corruption.
The risk of split brain syndrome is considerably greater with extended
distance clusters and disaster tolerant solutions in which nodes are
located in different data centers at some distance from each other. For
these types of solution, some form of arbitration is essential.
The unlikely but possible scenario of split brain can be definitively
avoided with an arbitration device. In other words, the risk of data
corruption can be eliminated. The HP Serviceguard family of clustering
software includes this level of protection.