Comparison of Redundancy Schemes for Distributed Storage Systems

Reliable distributed data storage systems have to employ redundancy codes to tolerate the loss of storages. Many appropriate codes and algorithms can be found in the literature, but efficient schemes for tolerating several storage failures and their embedding in a distributed system are still research issues. In this paper, a variety of redundancy schemes are compared that got implemented in a distributed storage system. All schemes are based on parity and Reed/Solomon and are integrated in the storage system NetRAID. This system allows to configure several user-specified layouts. A performance and reliability analysis of several data and redundancy layouts is presented that combines analytical and experimental results. In a detail, we present performance results for an optimized Reed/Solomon implementation and give an outline for speeding up encoding and recovery by reconfigurable hardware employed in the distributed storage system.