Erasure Codes for Storage Systems: A Brief Primer

Storage systems have grown to the point where failures are inevitable, and those who design systems must plan ahead so that precious data is not lost when failures occur. The core technology for protecting data from failures is erasure coding, which has a rich 50+ year history stemming communication systems, and as such, can be confusing to the storage systems community. In this article, I present a primer on erasure coding as it applies to storage systems, and I summarize some recent research on erasure coding.