EECS Publication
A New MDS Erasure Code for RAID-6
James S. Plank
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.
Published 2007-09-25 04:00:00 as ut-cs-07-602 (ID:124)
ut-cs-07-602.pdf
http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/papers/CS-07-602.html