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 a novel non-MDS erasure code. In replication method, access to one replication node is adequate 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, thereby consuming more repair bandwidth. The current paper aims at investigating a new type of erasure codes with a reduced repair bandwidth as compared to conventional MDS erasure codes. Specifically, we propose a non-MDS (2k,k)code that tolerates any three node failures and more importantly, it is shown using the proposed code a single node failure can be repaired through connecting to only three nodes which gives the ability to reduce the repair bandwidth comparing to MDS codes