A Tale of Two Erasure Codes in HDFS

Distributed storage systems are increasingly transitioning to the use of erasure codes since they offer higher reliability at significantly lower storage costs than data replication. However, these codes tradeoff recovery performance as they require multiple disk reads and network transfers for reconstructing an unavailable data block. As a result, most existing systems use an erasure code either optimized for storage overhead or recovery performance.

In this paper, we present HACFS, a new erasure-coded storage system that instead uses two different erasure codes and dynamically adapts to workload changes. It uses a fast code to optimize for recovery performance and a compact code to reduce the storage overhead. A novel conversion mechanism is used to efficiently upcode and downcode data blocks between fast and compact codes. We show that HACFS design techniques are generic and successfully apply it to two different code families: Product and LRC codes.

We have implemented HACFS as an extension to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and experimentally evaluate it with five different workloads from production clusters. The HACFS system always maintains a low storage overhead and significantly improves the recovery performance as compared to three popular singlecode storage systems. It reduces the degraded read latency by up to 46%, and the reconstruction time and disk/network traffic by up to 45%.