Boosting the Performance of Degraded Reads in RS-coded Distributed Storage Systems

Abstract

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes have been increasingly adopted by distributed storage systems in place of replication,because they provide the same level of availability with much lower storage overhead. However, a key drawback of those RS-coded distributed storage systems is the poor latency of degraded reads, which can be incurred by data failures or hot spots,and are not rare in production environments. To address this issue, we propose a novel parallel reconstruction solution called APLS. APLS leverages all surviving source nodes to send the data needed by degraded reads and chooses light-loaded starter nodes to receive the reconstructed data of those degraded reads. Hence, the latency of the degraded reads can be improved.Prototyping-based experiments are conducted to compare APLS with ECPipe, the state-of-the-art solution of improving the latency of degraded reads. The experimental results demonstrate that APLS effectively reduces the latency, particularly under heavy or medium workloads.