Erasure coding (EC), a method of data protection, involves breaking data into fragments, expanding and encoding them with redundant pieces, and storing them across multiple locations or storage media. This allows for data reconstruction in case of drive failures or corruption, increasing redundancy without the limitations of RAID implementations.
To implement EC, data is split into fragments and additional parity blocks are created for recovery. The fragments and parity blocks are stored across different drives, providing protection against data loss. Different configurations like 5+2 or 17+3 have varying levels of fault tolerance and storage overhead, offering flexible options for data protection.
In comparison to RAID, EC offers greater fault tolerance, flexibility, and better resource utilization. While RAID is well-established with fixed redundancy levels, EC allows for specific data protection requirements to be met. However, EC can be processing intensive and require more resources compared to RAID configurations.
Overall, EC is gaining popularity, especially for large object-based data sets in the cloud. Key use cases include distributed storage systems, disk arrays, cloud data stores, and backups. EC offers benefits such as better resource utilization, lower risk of data loss, greater flexibility, durability, and enhanced resiliency, making it a viable option for organizations looking to scale their storage systems efficiently.