James S. Plank, Joel Friedman and Kai Li
Technical Report CS-94-243, University of Tennessee, August, 1994.
See the SP&E paper that is the published extension of this work.
Available via anonymous ftp to cs.utk.edu in pub/plank/papers/CS-94-243.ps.Z.
This paper presents a general method to recover from the failure of m arbitrary storage devices with the addition of exactly m checksum devices. The method is an application of Reed-Solomon codes, and can be viewed as a generalization of N+1-Parity.
This paper has two goals concerning this algorithm. First, it provides a complete specification of how to code this problem with this algorithm. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first such specification. Second, we have implemented the coding and recovery algorithm in software and shown that the method is efficient, general, and practical.