Patent ID: 6990606

Claim:
A method for handling failover of a data management application for a shared disk file system in a distributed computing environment having a cluster of loosely coupled nodes which provide services, comprising the steps of: defining certain nodes of the cluster as failover candidate nodes; storing configuration information for all the failover candidate nodes; distributing message information including but not limited to failure information of at least one failover candidate node among the failover candidate nodes; analyzing the distributed message information and the stored configuration information in order to determine whether to take over the service of a failure node by a failover candidate node or not; in a first failover candidate node, taking over only a subset of the file system from the failure node; carrying over a remaining portion of the file system not taken over by the first failover candidate node to at least a second failover candidate node; and updating the configuration information in case of the first failover candidate node and at least the second failover candidate node taking over the service of a failure node.