On the I/O Costs of Some Repair Schemes for Full-Length Reed-Solomon Codes

TL;DR

This paper investigates the I/O costs associated with repair schemes for full-length Reed-Solomon codes, highlighting the importance of disk read operations in the efficiency of node failure recovery in distributed storage systems.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of disk I/O costs for existing repair schemes of full-length Reed-Solomon codes, addressing a key gap in understanding their practical efficiency.

Findings

Quantifies I/O costs of repair schemes

Identifies trade-offs between network bandwidth and disk reads

Offers insights for designing more efficient repair methods

Abstract

Network transfer and disk read are the most time consuming operations in the repair process for node failures in erasure-code-based distributed storage systems. Recent developments on Reed-Solomon codes, the most widely used erasure codes in practical storage systems, have shown that efficient repair schemes specifically tailored to these codes can significantly reduce the network bandwidth spent to recover single failures. However, the I/O cost, that is, the number of disk reads performed in these repair schemes remains largely unknown. We take the first step to address this gap in the literature by investigating the I/O costs of some existing repair schemes for full-length Reed-Solomon codes.