Dynamic erasure coding decision for modern block-oriented distributed storage systems

Modern block-oriented distributed storage systems like Hadoop distributed file system have proliferated in this era of big data and cloud computing. These systems feature block-level replication in which their files are partitioned into equal-sized blocks and multiple copies for each block are then arbitrarily distributed across nodes for fault tolerance and data availability. However, many storage volumes are just wasted only for keeping block copies whose data may not be accessed frequently in the strategy. Therefore, distributed storage systems begin to adopt erasure codes. However, classical parity encoding scheme are hard to be directly applied to the distributed storage systems since block copies are arbitrarily placed across nodes in the systems. We present a novel technique, called DynaEC, to address the issues in modern block-oriented distributed storage systems. DynaEC provides a unique parity encoding algorithm that encodes data blocks arbitrarily distributed across machines to parities and then places the parities guaranteeing fault tolerance. Parity encoding in DynaEC is performed without any change of the original block placement policy in Hadoop distributed file system. This makes DynaEC work seamlessly with Hadoop distributed file system. Finally, during the encoding procedure each data node encodes each own data blocks, not requiring any information about other blocks located in other data nodes. As such, the encoding procedure in DynaEC is fully performed in parallel without any synchronization issue. With extensive experiments, we show that DynaEC saves storage volumes up to the theoretical limit while outperforming previous approaches by multiple orders of magnitude.