A system and method for coordinated bringup of a storage appliance in a storage appliance cluster. The repaired storage appliance, during its initialization, sets a variety of state values in a predetermined memory location comprising a state data structure, which is detected by a remote direct memory access read operation by the surviving storage appliance. By the use of the RDMA operations, the repaired storage appliance and surviving storage appliance coordinate the bringup and giveback of data servicing functionality.