The RAID-6 liberation codes

  • Authors:
  • James S. Plank

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee

  • Venue:
  • FAST'08 Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2008

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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.