TIP-Code: A Three Independent Parity Code to Tolerate Triple Disk Failures with Optimal Update Complextiy

With the rapid expansion of data storages and the increasing risk of data failures, triple Disk Failure Tolerant arrays (3DFTs) become popular and widely used. They achieve high fault tolerance via erasure codes. One class of erasure codes called Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes, which aims to offer data protection with minimal storage overhead, is a typical choice to enhance the reliability of storage systems. However, existing 3DFTs based on MDS codes are inefficient in terms of update complexity, which results in poor write performance. In this paper, we present an efficient MDS coding scheme called TIP-code, which is purely based on XOR operations and can tolerate triple disk failures. It uses three independent parities (horizontal, diagonal and anti-diagonal parities), and offers optimal update complexity. To demonstrate the effectiveness of TIP-code, we conduct several quantitative analysis and experiments. The results show that, compared to typical MDS codes for 3DFTs (i.e., Cauchy-RS and STAR codes), TIP-code improves the single write performance by up to 46.6%.