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USENIX, The Advanced Computing Systems Association

FAST '08 – Abstract

Pp. 97–110 of the Proceedings

The RAID-6 Liberation Codes

James S. Plank, University of Tennessee

Abstract

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.
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Last changed: 7 May 2008 mn