Reference-Counter Aware Deduplication in Erasure-Coded Distributed Storage System

In modern distributed storage systems, space efficiency and system reliability are two major concerns. As a result, contemporary storage systems often employ data deduplication and erasure coding to reduce the storage overhead and provide fault tolerance, respectively. However, little work has been done to explore the relationship between these two techniques. In this paper, we propose Reference-counter Aware Deduplication (RAD), which employs the features of deduplication into erasure coding to improve garbage collection performance when deletion occurs. RAD wisely encodes the data according to the reference counter, which is provided by the deduplication level and thus reduces the encoding overhead when garbage collection is conducted. Further, since the reference counter also represents the reliability levels of the data chunks, we additionally made some effort to explore the trade-offs between storage overhead and reliability level among different erasure codes. The experiment results show that RAD can effectively improve the GC performance by up to 24.8% and the reliability analysis shows that, with certain data features, RAD can provide both better reliability and better storage efficiency compared to the traditional Round- Robin placement.