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

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.Comment: Accepted by the ISIT'1

New Centralized MSR Codes With Small Sub-packetization

Centralized repair refers to repairing $h\geq 2$ node failures using $d$ helper nodes in a centralized way, where the repair bandwidth is counted by the total amount of data downloaded from the helper nodes. A centralized MSR code is an MDS array code with $(h,d)$-optimal repair for some $h$ and $d$. In this paper, we present several classes of centralized MSR codes with small sub-packetization. At first, we construct an alternative MSR code with $(1,d_i)$-optimal repair for multiple repair degrees $d_i$ simultaneously. Based on the code structure, we are able to construct a centralized MSR code with $(h_i,d_i)$-optimal repair property for all possible $(h_i,d_i)$ with $h_i\mid (d_i-k)$ simultaneously. The sub-packetization is no more than ${\rm lcm}(1,2,\ldots,n-k)(n-k)^n$, which is much smaller than a previous work given by Ye and Barg ($({\rm lcm}(1,2,\ldots,n-k))^n$). Moreover, for general parameters $2\leq h\leq n-k$ and $k\leq d\leq n-h$, we further give a centralized MSR code enabling $(h,d)$-optimal repair with sub-packetization smaller than all previous works