Comm Vault Systems, Inc.

Anand Vishwanath Vastrad

Avinash Lakshman

Srinivas Lakshman

Suhani Gupta

A distributed data storage system using erasure coding (EC) provides advantages of EC data storage while retaining high resiliency for EC data storage architectures having fewer data storage nodes than the number of EC data-plus-parity fragments. An illustrative embodiment is a three-node data storage system with EC 4+2. Incoming data is temporarily replicated to ameliorate the effects of certain storage node outages or fatal disk failures, so that read and write operations can continue from/to the storage system. The system is equipped to automatically heal failed EC write attempts in a manner transparent to users and/or applications: when all storage nodes are operational, the distributed data storage system automatically converts the temporarily replicated data to EC storage and reclaims storage space previously used by the temporarily replicated data. Individual hardware failures are healed through migration techniques that reconstruct and re-fragment data blocks according to the governing EC scheme.

Distributed data storage system using erasure coding on storage nodes fewer than data plus parity fragments

Distributed data storage system using erasure coding on storage nodes fewer than data plus parity fragments and healing failed write attempts

A distributed data storage system using erasure coding (EC) provides advantages of EC data storage while retaining high resiliency for EC data storage architectures having fewer data storage nodes than the number of EC data-plus-parity fragments. To ameliorate the effects of certain storage node outages or fatal disk failures, incoming data is temporarily replicated so that read and write operations can continue from/to the storage system. The system automatically heals failed EC write attempts in a manner transparent to users and/or applications: when all storage nodes are operational, the distributed data storage system automatically converts the temporarily replicated data to EC storage and reclaims storage space previously used by the temporarily replicated data. Individual hardware failures are healed through migration techniques that reconstruct and re-fragment data blocks according to the governing EC scheme. An illustrative embodiment is a three-node data storage system using EC 4+2.

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Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Anand Vishwanath Vastrad