A Performance Evaluation and Examination of Open-Source Erasure Coding Libraries for Storage

Over the past five years, large-scale storage installations have required fault-protection beyond RAID-5, leading to a flurry of research on and development of erasure codes for multiple disk failures. Numerous open-source implementations of various coding techniques are available to the general public. In this paper, the authors perform a head-to-head comparison of these implementations in encoding and decoding scenarios. The goals are to compare codes and implementations, to discern whether theory matches practice, and to demonstrate how parameter selection, especially as it concerns memory, has a significant impact on a code's performance.