Nutanix, Inc.
Pulsed leader consensus management

Abstract:

A system using pulsed leader consensus management that can manage storage by electing a leader node from a group of nodes and fulfilling read requests for the group of nodes if a sync state is not expired. The sync state can correspond to two conditions: first, that the nodes in the group direct the write requests for the group to the leader node; second, that a health pulse is detected, wherein the health pulse is generated if the leader node is alive (e.g. has not failed, terminated, or become non-responsive). If either of the two conditions fail, the sync state can be considered expired and the group of nodes may fall back to consensus-based read mechanisms, such as Paxos, until a new leader node is elected.