Beehive: Erasure Codes for Fixing Multiple Failures in Distributed Storage Systems
Jun Li, Baochun Li · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems · 2016
In distributed storage systems, erasure codes have been increasingly deployed to tolerate server failures without loss of data. Traditional erasure codes, such as Reed-Solomon codes, suffer from a high volume of network transfer and disk I/O to recover unavailable data at failed storage servers. Typically, unavailable data at different failed storage servers in a distributed storage system are fixed separately. It has been shown that it is possible to reduce the volume of network transfer significantly by reconstructing data from multiple storage servers at the same time. However, there has been no construction of erasure codes to achieve it without imposing strict constraints on system parameters. In this paper, we propose Beehive codes, designed for optimizing the volume of network transfers to fix the data on multiple failed storage servers. Beehive codes can be constructed over a wide range of system parameters at code rate no more than 0.5, while incurring slightly more storage overhead than Reed-Solomon codes. To achieve the optimal storage overhead as Reed-Solomon codes, we further extend vanilla Beehive codes to MDS Beehive codes, which incurs near-optimal volumes of network transfers during reconstruction. We implement both Beehive and MDS Beehive Codes in C++ and evaluate their performance on Amazon EC2. Our evaluation results have clearly shown that the volume of both network transfers and disk I/O can be conserved by a substantial margin.