Erasure Coding

erasure coding - Erasure coding (EC) is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces and stored across a set of different locations, such as disks, storage nodes or geographic locations.

Erasure coding creates a mathematical function to describe a set of numbers so they can be checked for accuracy and recovered if one is lost. Referred to as polynomial interpolation or oversampling, this is the key concept behind erasure codes.

In mathematical terms, the protection offered by erasure coding can be represented in simple form by the following equation: n = k + m. The variable “k” is the original amount of data or symbols. The variable “m” stands for the extra or redundant symbols that are added to provide protection from failures. The variable “n” is the total number of symbols created after the erasure coding process.

For instance, in a 10 of 16 configuration, or EC 10/16, six extra symbols (m) would be added to the 10 base symbols (k). The 16 data fragments (n) would be spread across 16 drives, nodes or geographic locations. The original file could be reconstructed from 10 verified fragments.

Erasure codes, also known as forward error correction (FEC) codes, were developed more than 50 years ago. Different types have emerged since that time. In one of the earliest and most common types, Reed-Solomon, the data can be reconstructed using any combination of “k” symbols, or pieces of data, even if “m” symbols are lost or unavailable. For example, in EC 10/16, six drives, nodes or geographic locations could be lost or unavailable, and the original file would still be recoverable.

Erasure coding can be useful with large quantities of data and any applications or systems that need to tolerate failures, such as disk array systems, data grids, distributed storage applications, object stores and archival storage. One common current use case for erasure coding is object-based cloud storage

Related glossary terms: Fast Guide to RAM, data reduction in primary storage (DRIPS), automated storage tiering (AST)

[Category=Data Management ]

Source: WhatIs.com, 02 August 2013 09:09:13, http://whatis.techtarget.com/glossary/Data-and-Data-Management