One of my favorite things about VoltDB, as one of the people who built it, is that its serializable isolation is actually a fundimental part of the architecture.
Many of these systems get slower as you turn up the isolation. VoltDB is faster because of isolation.
Yeah, as Ryan said, no split brains possible in VoltDB for quite some time. We originally had split brain protection something you could enable for cloud deployments, but figured it wouldn't be worth the tradeoff if you had 5 machines in a rack connected directly. It turns out we made a bad choice and we fixed it.
Unless you're speaking of something else you heard about on a more recent version?
As mentioned in my reply to that forum post, VoltDB includes a fault resolution protocol to prevent split brain (VoltDB will trade availability for consistency if required.) a couple of years ago, we decided to to enable that feature by default to maintain the serializability contract as the default choice.
Many of these systems get slower as you turn up the isolation. VoltDB is faster because of isolation.
More here: http://voltdb.com/products/featuresbenefits/reasons-behind-v...