What Is Erasure Coding (EC)?
SearchStorage, Wednesday, June 12th, 2024
Erasure coding (EC) is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces, and stored across a set of different locations or storage media.
= What is erasure coding (EC)? - Erasure coding (EC) is a method of data protection in which data is broken into fragments, expanded and encoded with redundant data pieces, and stored across a set of different locations or storage media.
If a drive fails or data becomes corrupted, the data can be reconstructed from the segments stored on the other drives. In this way, EC can help increase data redundancy without the overhead or limitations that come with different implementations of RAID (redundant array of independent disks).
How does erasure coding work?
Erasure coding works by splitting a unit of data, such as a file or object, into multiple fragments, or data blocks, and then creating additional fragments, or parity blocks, that can be used for data recovery. For each parity fragment, the erasure coding algorithm calculates the parity's value based on the original data fragments.
The data and parity fragments are stored across multiple drives to protect against data loss in case a drive fails or data becomes corrupted on one of the drives. If such an event occurs, the parity fragments can be used to rebuild the data unit without experiencing data loss.