A shared nothing architecture is a distributed database architecture without a single point of failure. The term "shared nothing" is by imitation of other terms such as "shared disk", "shared network" and so on.

A typical shared nothing system would have duplicated disks, processors, power supplies, and networks. To make the system truly resilient, it should also have these systems split between different physical sites, and have multiple sources of electrical power and network connections to the outside world through physically diverse paths.