Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for identifying “free” compute nodes that have not been configured as a member of a secondary storage system. As disclosed, a node may automatically detect that it is a free node (i.e., one available to join a distributed computing cluster which provides the secondary storage system or to form a new cluster). When a node detects that it is not part of a cluster, the node may build an initial network configuration and begin advertising itself as a free node. Once the initial network state is available, the node may broadcast advertisements observed by a management tool and joined to the secondary storage system.

Abstract: One embodiment of the invention includes a system for performing intelligent disaster recovery. The system includes a processor and a memory. The memory stores a first monitor application that, when executed on the processor, performs an operation. The operation includes communicating with a second monitor application hosted at a secondary data center to determine an availability of one or more computer servers at a primary data center. The operation also includes upon reaching a consensus with the second monitor application that one or more computer servers at the primary data center are unavailable to process client requests, relative to both the first monitor application and the second monitor application, initiating a failover operation. Embodiments of the invention also include a method and a computer-readable medium for performing intelligent disaster recovery.