Reliability Stripe Coagulation in Two Failure Tolerant Storage Arrays

Abstract

As the industry slowly transitions to data centers made up of electronic instead of magnetic storage components, the rate of device failure and page corruption will decrease, but not vanish. In this emerging environment, redundant storage is still required to safeguard data. We argue that the use of two failure resilient linear codes with an exclusive-or (xor) based P-parity and a Q-parity calculated using a finite field operations is appropriate. We use the algebraic property of finite fields to show how to coagulate a number of small constituent’’ reliability stripes into larger coagulated stripes without recalculating parities. This allows to protect largely inactive data with more storage efficient larger reliability stripes. The procedure is reversible.