Hybrid-RC: Flexible Erasure Codes with Optimized Recovery Performance and Low Storage Overhead

Erasure codes are widely used in practical storage systems to prevent disk failure and data loss. However, these codes require excessive disk I/Os and network traffic for recovering unavailable data. As a result, the recovery performance of erasure codes is suboptimal. Among all erasure codes, Minimum Storage Regenerating (MSR) codes can achieve optimal repair bandwidth under the minimum storage during recovery, but some open issues remain to be addressed before applying them in real systems. In this paper, we present Hybrid Regenerating Codes (Hybrid-RC), a new set of erasure codes with optimized recovery performance and low storage overhead. The codes utilize the superiority of MSR codes to compute a subset of data blocks while some other parity blocks are used for reliability maintenance. As a result, our design is near-optimal with respect to storage and network traffic. We show that Hybrid-RC reduces the reconstruction cost by up to 21% compared to the Local Reconstruction Codes (LRC) with the same storage overhead. Most importantly, in Hybrid-RC, each block contributes only half the amount of data when processing a single block failure. Therefore, the number of I/Os consumed per block is reduced by 50%, which is of great help to balance the network load and reduce the latency.