Biblio

Modern storage systems stripe redundant data across multiple nodes to provide availability guarantees against node failures. One form of data redundancy is based on XOR-based erasure codes, which use only XOR operations for encoding and decoding. In addition to tolerating failures, a storage system must also provide fast failure recovery to reduce the window of vulnerability. This work addresses the problem of speeding up the recovery of a single-node failure for general XOR-based erasure codes. We propose a replace recovery algorithm, which uses a hill-climbing technique to search for a fast recovery solution, such that the solution search can be completed within a short time period. We further extend the algorithm to adapt to the scenario where nodes have heterogeneous capabilities (e.g., processing power and transmission bandwidth). We implement our replace recovery algorithm atop a parallelized architecture to demonstrate its feasibility. We conduct experiments on a networked storage system testbed, and show that our replace recovery algorithm uses less recovery time than the conventional recovery approach.
 

In modern parallel storage systems (e.g., cloud storage and data centers), it is important to provide data availability guarantees against disk (or storage node) failures via redundancy coding schemes. One coding scheme is X-code, which is double-fault tolerant while achieving the optimal update complexity. When a disk/node fails, recovery must be carried out to reduce the possibility of data unavailability. We propose an X-code-based optimal recovery scheme called minimum-disk-read-recovery (MDRR), which minimizes the number of disk reads for single-disk failure recovery. We make several contributions. First, we show that MDRR provides optimal single-disk failure recovery and reduces about 25 percent of disk reads compared to the conventional recovery approach. Second, we prove that any optimal recovery scheme for X-code cannot balance disk reads among different disks within a single stripe in general cases. Third, we propose an efficient logical encoding scheme that issues balanced disk read in a group of stripes for any recovery algorithm (including the MDRR scheme). Finally, we implement our proposed recovery schemes and conduct extensive testbed experiments in a networked storage system prototype. Experiments indicate that MDRR reduces around 20 percent of recovery time of the conventional approach, showing that our theoretical findings are applicable in practice.