In distributed storage systems built using commodity hardware, it is necessary to have data redundancy in order to ensure system reliability. In such systems, it is also often desirable to be able to quickly repair storage nodes that fail. We consider a scheme — introduced by El Rouayheb and Ramchandran — which uses combinatorial block design in order to design storage systems that enable efficient (and exact) node repair. In this work, we investigate systems where node sizes may be much larger than replication degrees, and explicitly provide algorithms for constructing these storage designs. Our designs, which are related to projective geometries, are based on the construction of bipartite cage graphs (with girth 6) and the concept of mutually-orthogonal Latin squares. Via these constructions, we can guarantee that the resulting designs require the fewest number of storage nodes for the given parameters, and can further show that these systems can be easily expanded without need for frequent reconfiguration.
The problem of distributed storage with efficient repair is discussed in @cite_20 . Using network coding, the authors propose a scheme for storing data where node repair is functional. @cite_20 also define the idea of a storage-bandwidth tradeoff, and discuss ways to implement either minimum storage or minimum bandwidth systems. Even though exact repair of storage nodes is sometimes necessary, the storage-bandwidth tradeoff under exact repair is not yet fully understood. Building upon the network coding constructions of @cite_20 , @cite_3 give a scheme for achieving the minimum bandwidth operating point under exact repair, finding a point on the storage-bandwidth tradeoff curve.
@cite_3 @cite_20
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We consider the setting of data storage across n nodes in a distributed manner. A data collector (DC) should be able to reconstruct the entire data by connecting to any k out of the n nodes and downloading all the data stored in them. When a node fails, it has to be regenerated back using the existing nodes. In a recent paper, have obtained an information theoretic lower bound for the repair bandwidth. Also, there has been additional interest in storing data in systematic form as no post processing is required when DC connects to k systematic nodes. Because of their preferred status there is a need to regenerate back any systematic node quickly and exactly. Replacement of a failed node by an exact replica is termed Exact Regeneration.In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the repair bandwidth for exact regeneration of the systematic nodes. The file to be stored is of size B and each node can store alpha = B k units of data. A failed systematic node is regenerated by downloading beta units of data each from d existing nodes. We give a lower bound for the repair bandwidth for exact regeneration of the systematic nodes which matches with the bound given by For d >= 2k-1 we give an explicit code construction which minimizes the repair bandwidth when the existing k-1 systematic nodes participate in the regeneration. We show the existence and construction of codes that achieve the bound for d >= 2k-3. Here we also establish the necessity of interference alignment. We prove that the bound is not achievable for d = 2k-1. Distributed storage systems need to store data redundantly in order to provide some fault-tolerance and guarantee system reliability. Different coding techniques have been proposed to provide the required redundancy more efficiently than traditional replication schemes. However, compared to replication, coding techniques are less efficient for repairing lost redundancy, as they require retrieval of larger amounts of data from larger subsets of storage nodes. To mitigate these problems, several recent works have presented locally repairable codes designed to minimize the repair traffic and the number of nodes involved per repair. Unfortunately, existing methods often lead to codes where there is only one subset of nodes able to repair a piece of lost data, limiting the local repairability to the availability of the nodes in this subset. In this paper, we present a new family of locally repairable codes that allows different trade-offs between the number of contacted nodes per repair, and the number of different subsets of nodes that enable this repair. We show that slightly increasing the number of contacted nodes per repair allows to have repair alternatives, which in turn increases the probability of being able to perform efficient repairs. Finally, we present pg-BLRC, an explicit construction of locally repairable codes with multiple repair alternatives, constructed from partial geometries, in particular from Generalized Quadrangles. We show how these codes can achieve practical lengths and high rates, while requiring a small number of nodes per repair, and providing multiple repair alternatives. We consider exact repair of failed nodes in maximum distance separable (MDS) code based distributed storage systems. It is well known that an (n, k) MDS code can tolerate failure (erasure) of up to n − k storage disks, when the code is used to store k information elements over n distributed storage disks. The focus of this paper is optimal recovery, in terms of repair bandwidth - the amount of data to be downloaded to repair a failed node - for a single failed node. When a single node fails, it has been previously shown by Dimakis et. al. that the amount of repair bandwidth is at least equation units, when each storage disk stores ℒ units of data. The achievability of this lower bound of equation units, for arbitrary values of (n, k); has been shown previously using asymptotic code constructions based on asymptotic interference alignment. However, the existence of finite codes satisfying this lower bound has been shown only for specific regimes of (n, k) and their existence for arbitrary values of (n, k) remained open. In this paper, we provide the first known construction of a finite code for arbitrary (n, k), which can repair a single failed systematic node by downloading exactly equation units of data. The code that we construct is based on permutation matrices and hence termed the Permutation Code. Erasure coding techniques are used to increase the reliability of distributed storage systems while minimizing storage overhead. Also of interest is minimization of the bandwidth required to repair the system following a node failure. In a recent paper, characterize the tradeoff between the repair bandwidth and the amount of data stored per node. They also prove the existence of regenerating codes that achieve this tradeoff. In this paper, we introduce Exact Regenerating Codes, which are regenerating codes possessing the additional property of being able to duplicate the data stored at a failed node. Such codes require low processing and communication overheads, making the system practical and easy to maintain. Explicit construction of exact regenerating codes is provided for the minimum bandwidth point on the storage-repair bandwidth tradeoff, relevant to distributed-mail-server applications. A subspace based approach is provided and shown to yield necessary and sufficient conditions on a linear code to possess the exact regeneration property as well as prove the uniqueness of our construction. Also included in the paper, is an explicit construction of regenerating codes for the minimum storage point for parameters relevant to storage in peer-to-peer systems. This construction supports a variable number of nodes and can handle multiple, simultaneous node failures. All constructions given in the paper are of low complexity, requiring low field size in particular.