Emc Corporation

Timothy Heath

Ivan Donald Novick

Sharad Kala

A primary master node and a standby master node monitor the health of a shared nothing database appliance to afford high availability while minimizing false negatives and duplicate alerts by executing continuously in parallel complimentary processes that determine whether the database is running, and which master node is the active database master node. The active database master node monitors the health of the components of the database appliance by polling each component to detect failures and warnings, and the other master node monitors the status of the active master node. Upon detecting a failure of the active master node, the other node takes over health monitoring. If the database is not running, the designated primary master node performs health monitoring.

Minimizing false negative and duplicate health monitoring alerts in a dual master shared nothing database appliance

A distributed reusable framework comprising a non-logging resumable workflow of actions that runs independently in parallel to upgrade each machine of a large distributed cluster of machines. A CHECK process and a RUN process are associated with each action in the workflow. The CHECK process determines dynamically the state of each action, and the RUN process brings an action to a completed state. Following a reboot on a machine, the workflow on the machine sequences back to its start and rechecks each prior action of the workflow to verify that each action is in a completed state before. Upon a failure of the upgrade on a single machine in the cluster, the failed machine can be fixed and the workflow can be resumed without redoing the work already done. Since the actual live state is verified on each machine of the cluster, log files are unnecessary.

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Belmont, CA, United States of America

Timothy Heath