Reliability Study of Coding Schemes for Wide-Area Distributed Storage Systems

Distributed storage systems comprise a large number of commodity hardware distributed across several data centers. Even in the presence of failures (permanent failures) the system should provide reliable storage. While replication has advantages because of its simplicity there exist coding techniques that provide adaptable reliability properties with an optimal redundancy ratio at the same time e.g. MDS (maximum distance separable) erasure codes. The coding and distribution scheme influences the prospective storage reliability. In this paper we present reliability models for erasure coding and replication techniques especially for their application in wide-area storage systems. Furthermore we utilize these models to quantify the reliability properties of concrete data storage scenarios.