A Non-MDS Erasure Code Scheme For Storage Applications

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of redundancy and self repairing against node failures in distributed storage systems, using various strategies. In replication method, access to one replication node is sufficient to reconstruct a lost node, while in MDS erasure coded systems which are optimal in terms of redundancy-reliability tradeoff, a single node failure is repaired after recovering the entire stored data. Moreover, regenerating codes yield a tradeoff curve between storage capacity and repair bandwidth. The current paper aims at investigating a new storage code. Specifically, we propose a non-MDS (2k, k) code that tolerates any three node failures and more importantly, it is shown using our code a single node failure can be repaired through access to only three nodes.