Abstract: Systems, methods, and computer program products for managing a consensus group in a distributed computing cluster, by determining that an instance of an authority module executing on a first node, of a consensus group of nodes in the distributed computing cluster, has failed; and adding, by an instance of the authority module on a second node of the consensus group, a new node to the consensus group to replace the first node. The new node is a node in the computing cluster that was not a member of the consensus group at the time the instance of the authority module executing on the first node is determined to have failed.

Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for allocating shared resources to nodes in a distributed computing network system. Nodes request a lock for each instance of a computing resource (e.g., a virtual IP address associated with a service provided by the distributed computing network system) from a distributed lock manager. The distributed lock manager maintains a queue of requests for each instance of the shared resource. Upon receiving a lock from the distributed lock manager, the receiving node performs a fairness allocation protocol to determine whether to accept the lock. If so determined, the shared computing resources associated with the lock is configured.

Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for managing a high performance, fault-tolerant, strongly consistent, distributed key-value store system. The key-value store may store information, such as metadata for a distributed file system. Fault-tolerance means that the distributed key-value store continues to provide access to values in the key-value store in spite of a certain number of node failures. To provide this capability, the key-value store may store copies of (key, value) pair on N+1 nodes in order to provide fault tolerance for the failure of up to N nodes. In addition, metadata describing which nodes store a given value is stored on 2N+1 nodes and the distributed key-value store is sized such that there are 3N+1 nodes in a cluster. Doing so allows the key, value store to tolerate a failure of N nodes, while still maintaining a consistent and available key-value store.

Abstract: Techniques are disclosed which allow a secondary storage system to provide data to non-production workloads in conjunction with performing data backup and protection tasks. As disclosed, a secondary storage system exposes backup data stored by the secondary storage system to other workloads, such as test and development applications, data analytics, etc. These non-production workloads can run at the same time the secondary storage system provides backup services to a primary storage system. This consolidation eliminates the need for an enterprise to deploy separate storage clusters for analytics, test and development applications, etc. and eliminates unnecessary copies of data.