HDP code: A Horizontal-Diagonal Parity Code to Optimize I/O load balancing in RAID-6

With higher reliability requirements in clusters and data centers, RAID-6 has gained popularity due to its capability to tolerate concurrent failures of any two disks, which has been shown to be of increasing importance in large scale storage systems. Among various implementations of erasure codes in RAID-6, a typical set of codes known as Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes aim to offer data protection against disk failures with optimal storage efficiency. However, because of the limitation of horizontal parity or diagonal/anti-diagonal parities used in MDS codes, storage systems based on RAID-6 suffers from unbalanced I/O and thus low performance and reliability. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a new parity called Horizontal-Diagonal Parity (HDP), which takes advantages of both horizontal and diagonal/anti-diagonal parities. The corresponding MDS code, called HDP code, distributes parity elements uniformly in each disk to balance the I/O workloads. HDP also achieves high reliability via speeding up the recovery under single or double disk failure. Our analysis shows that HDP provides better balanced I/O and higher reliability compared to other popular MDS codes.