The RAID-6 Liberation Codes

Appearing in FAST-08: 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies San Jose, California, February, 2008.

I don't have the PDF for the paper posted; However, you may view the submission in Technical Report CS-07-602.

Abstract

The RAID-6 specification calls for a storage system with multiple storage devices to tolerate the failure of any two devices. Numerous erasure coding techniques have been developed that can implement RAID-6; however, each has limitations. In this paper, we describe a new class of RAID-6 codes called the Liberation Codes. These codes encode, update and decode either optimally or close to optimally. Their modification overhead is lower than all other RAID-6 codes, and their encoding performance is often better as well. We provide an exact specification of the Liberation Codes and assess their performance in relation to other RAID-6 coding techniques. In the process, we describe an algorithm called bit matrix scheduling which improves the performance of decoding drastically. Finally, we present a freely available library which facilitates the use of Liberation Codes in RAID-6 sytems.

Citation Information

Plain Text:

.inproceedings  p:08:lib
author          J. S. Plank
title           The RAID-6 Liberation Codes
booktitle       FAST-2008: 6th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies
month           February
year            2008
where           http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~jplank/plank/papers/FAST-2008.html

Bibtex:

@INPROCEEDINGS{p:08:lib,
        author = "J. S. Plank",
        title = "The {RAID-6} {L}iberation Codes",
        booktitle = "FAST-2008: 6th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies",
        month = "February",
        year = "2008",
        where = "http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~jplank/plank/papers/FAST-2008.html"
}