PhD seminar • EC-Store: A Dynamic Distributed Erasure Coded Storage System

Michael Abebe, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Cloud storage systems typically choose between replicating or erasure encoding data to provide fault tolerance. Replication ensures that data can be accessed from a single site but incurs a much higher storage overhead, which is a costly downside for large-scale storage systems. Erasure coding has a lower storage requirement but relies on encoding/decoding and distributed data retrieval that can result in increased response times. In this talk I will present EC-Store, a dynamic distributed erasure coded storage system that significantly reduces data retrieval times when compared to replicated and erasure coded storage systems. EC-Store achieves these reductions in latency by making intelligent data access decisions and dynamically moving data in response to system load and access patterns.