Erasure coding for data resiliency

Ensuring data resiliency is a critical concern for distributed storage systems, particularly in mitigating the risks posed by outages or hardware failures. UltiHash employs Reed-Solomon erasure coding to improve service availability and to also enhance data durability. This method organizes data in units of data called stripes, where each stripe gets split up into k shards, and an additional m additional parity shards are computed and stored for redundancy.

With this Reed-Solomon-based erasure coding scheme, an UltiHash storage cluster comprised of k + m data nodes offers a usable capacity equal to k nodes while being able to tolerate failures of up to m nodes without losing data or interrupting service availability.

In the event of failing data nodes, the parity shards allow the cluster to reconstruct the original data while keeping the service available, not requiring additional maintenance downtime. This approach provides a robust and efficient mechanism for improving service uptime and for mitigating the risk of data loss.