Application of Regenerating Codes for Fault Tolerance in Distributed Storage Systems

Recently, regenerating codes, a special network coding technique, were discovered for fault-tolerant storage systems with the promising advantage of efficient data recovery in the case of a single node failure and replacement (regeneration case). From the perspective of coding theory, regenerating codes are extensively studied, but there exists no reference on how to implement these codes in storage systems. We provide a comparison of Reed-Solomon codes and regenerating codes from an implementation point of view. The comparison includes the experimental evaluation of the encoding and the regeneration data throughput.