Patent ID: 11902083
Assignee: CISCO TECHNOLOGY, INC.
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC G  H

Claim 0:
1. A system comprising:
one or more cluster sites each having at least two storage/compute nodes;
at least one local external device associated with at least one of the one or more cluster sites, the at least one local external device configured to run a local witness service; and
a central cloud management platform in communication with the one or more cluster sites, the central cloud management platform configured to run a cloud witness service, and to manage the local witness service and the cloud witness service;
wherein the local witness service and the cloud witness service are each configured to selectively perform identical arbitration services if a storage/compute node in one of the one or more cluster sites fails or communication between storage/compute nodes in a cluster fails, and wherein the local witness service and the cloud witness service are instantiations of a witness server and are selectively reachable via a uniform service interface that is configured to allow for deployment of the witness server on different types of computing platforms and portability of the witness server across the different types of computing platforms.