Improve the Performance and Scalability of RAID-6 Systems Using Erasure Codes

RAID-6 is widely used to tolerate concurrent failures of any two disks to provide a higher level of reliability with the support of erasure codes. Among many implementations, one class of codes called Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes aims to offer data protection against disk failures with optimal storage efficiency. Typical MDS codes contain horizontal and vertical codes. However, because of the limitation of horizontal parity or diagonal/anti-diagonal parities used in MDS codes, existing RAID-6 systems suffer several important problems on performance and scalability, such as low write performance, unbalanced I/O, and high migration cost in the scaling process. To address these problems, in this dissertation, we design techniques for high performance and scalable RAID-6 systems. It includes high performance and load balancing erasure codes (H-Code and HDP Code), and Stripe-based Data Migration (SDM) scheme. We also propose a flexible MDS Scaling Framework (MDS-Frame), which can integrate H-Code, HDP Code and SDM scheme together. Detailed evaluation results are also given in this dissertation