Tutorial: Erasure Coding for Storage Applications

James S. Plank, EECS Department, University of Tennessee,
Cheng Huang, Microsoft Research

This tutorial was part of the the training program for FAST 2013: 11th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, San Jose, CA, February 12, 2013.

There are three documents available here:

Abstract

From disk arrays through clouds to archival systems, storage systems must tolerate failures and prevent data loss. Erasure coding provides the fundamental technology for storage systems to add redundancy and tolerate failures. This tutorial will cover the fundamentals of erasure coding, the mechanics of many erasure codes that apply to today's storage systems, and the properties of various erasure codes designed for a variety of storage scenarios.

Topics include:

General matrix-based codes, starting with classic Reed-Solomon codes
Galois Field arithmetic for erasure-coding, and how to implement it efficiently
RAID-6 codes: RDP, EVENODD, Minimum Density, X-Code
More general codes implemented with only the XOR operation: Generalized RDP/EVENODD
Cauchy Reed-Solomon codes
Open source library support for erasure codes
The reconstruction problem and techniques to reduce bandwidth and I/O
Regenerating codes
Practical MDS codes with efficient reconstruction: Rotated Reed-Solomon
Practical non-MDS codes with efficient reconstruction and their application in cloud storage: Pyramid codes, LRC and its deployment in Windows Azure Storage, PMDS
Erasure coding for Flash

Citation Information

Plain Text:

.misc		ph:13:tut
author          J. S. Plank and C. Huang
title           Tutorial: Erasure Coding for Storage Applications
howpublished    Slides presented at FAST-2013: 11th Usenix Conference on File and Storage 
                Technologies
month           February
year            2013
address         San Jose
where           http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~jplank/plank/papers/FAST-2013-Tutorial.html

Bibtex:

@MISC{ph:13:tut,
	author = "J. S. Plank and C. Huang",
	title = "Tutorial: Erasure Coding for Storage Applications",
	howpublished = "Slides presented at FAST-2013: 11th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies",
	month = "February",
	year = "2013",
	address = "San Jose",
	where = "http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~jplank/plank/papers/FAST-2013-Tutorial.html"
}