4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage TechnologiesAbstract
Pp. 183196 of the Proceedings
Matrix Methods for Lost Data Reconstruction in Erasure Codes
James Lee Hafner, Veera Deenadhayalan, and KK Rao, IBM Almaden Research Center; John A. Tomlin, Yahoo! Research
Abstract
Erasures codes, particularly those protecting against
multiple failures in RAID disk arrays, provide a codespecific
means for reconstruction of lost (erased) data.
In the RAID application this is modeled as loss of strips
so that reconstruction algorithms are usually optimized
to reconstruct entire strips; that is, they apply only to
highly correlated sector failures, i.e., sequential sectors
on a lost disk. In this paper we address two more general
problems: (1) recovery of lost data due to scattered
or uncorrelated erasures and (2) recovery of partial (but
sequential) data from a single lost disk (in the presence
of any number of failures). The latter case may arise in
the context of host IO to a partial strip on a lost disk.
The methodology we propose for both problems is completely
general and can be applied to any erasure code,
but is most suitable for XOR-based codes.
For the scattered erasures, typically due to hard errors
on the disk (or combinations of hard errors and
disk loss), our methodology provides for one of two
outcomes for the data on each lost sector. Either the
lost data is declared unrecoverable (in the informationtheoretic
sense) or it is declared recoverable and a formula
is provided for the reconstruction that depends only
on readable sectors. In short, the methodology is both
complete and constructive.
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