High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Fencing is the process of isolating a node of a computer cluster when the former is malfunctioning. Isolating a node means ensuring that I/O can no longer be done from it. Fencing is typically done automatically, by cluster infrastructure such as shared disk file systems, in order to protect processes from other active nodes modifying the resources during node failures. Mechanisms to support fencing, such as the reserve/release mechanism of SCSI, have existed since at least 1985 .