Encoding-Aware Data Placement for Efficient Degraded Reads in XOR-Coded Storage Systems

Erasure coding has been increasingly used by distributed storage systems to maintain fault tolerance with low storage redundancy. However, how to enhance the performance of degraded reads in erasure-coded storage has been a critical issue. We revisit this problem from two different perspectives that are neglected by existing studies: data placement and encoding rules. To this end, we propose an encoding-aware data placement (EDP) approach that aims to reduce the number of I/Os in degraded reads during a single failure for general XOR-based erasure codes. EDP carefully places sequential data based on the encoding rules of the given erasure code. Trace-driven evaluation results show that compared to two baseline data placement methods, EDP reduces up to 37.4% of read data on the most loaded disk and shortens up to 15.4% of read time.