Certain environments may prefer using a single private link or a public network for connecting nodes in a cluster, despite the loss of redundancy for dealing with network failures. The benefits of this approach include simpler hardware topology and lower costs; however, there is obviously a tradeoff with high availability.

For the above environments, SFCFSHA provides the option of a single private link, or using the public network as the private link if I/O fencing is present. I/O fencing is used to handle split-brain scenarios. The option for single network is given during installation.

See About preventing data corruption with I/O fencing.