Short Code: An Efficient RAID-6 MDS Code for Optimizing Degraded Reads and Partial Stripe Writes

As reliability requirements are increasingly important in both clusters and data centers, RAID-6, which can tolerate any two concurrent disk failures, has been widely used in modern storage systems. However, most existing RAID-6 codes cannot provide satisfied performance on both degraded reads and partial stripe writes, which are important performance metrics in storage systems. To address these problems, in this paper we propose a new RAID-6 MDS erasure code called Short Code, in order to optimize the degraded reads and partial stripe writes. In Short Code, we propose a novel short horizontal parity chain, which assures that all disks contribute to degraded reads while the continuous data elements are more likely to share the same horizontal chain for optimizing degraded reads. On the other hand, Short Code distributes all diagonal parities among disks for optimizing partial stripe writes. The proposed Short Code not only owns the optimal storage efficiency, but also keeps the optimal complexity for both encoding/decoding computations and update operations. The experiments show that Short Code achieves much higher speed on degraded reads and partial stripe writes than other popular RAID-6 codes, and provide acceptable performance on single disk failure recoveries and normal reads. Specifically, compared to RDP code, Short Code provides 6.1 to 26.3 percent higher speed on degraded reads and 36.2 to 80.3 percent higher speed on partial stripe writes with the same number of disks.