Parity Declustering for Fault-Tolerant Storage Systems via $t$-designs

Abstract

Parity declustering allows faster reconstruction of a disk array when some disk fails. Moreover, it guarantees uniform reconstruction workload on all surviving disks. It has been shown that parity declustering for one-failure tolerant array codes can be obtained via Balanced Incomplete Block Designs. We extend this technique for array codes that can tolerate an arbitrary number of disk failures via $t$-designs.