Maintenance-Efficient Erasure Coding for Distributed Archival Storage

Abstract

Maintenance is an important issue in distributed storage systems. In many cases, such as in archival storage where data access is infrequent, the workload due to maintaining a system is dominant and much heavier than that to answering retrieval queries. Erasure coding, widely used in many distributed storage systems for its high reliability, is efficient for maintenance but not so efficient for access. In this paper, we investigate an extension of this method with the purpose of improving maintenance efficiency and provide an analysis on the tradeoff of this extension.