Paper on Erasure Coding for Production in EOS Open Storage System

EDP Sciences has published, in EPJ Web of Conferences (Volume 245, 2020), an article written by Andreas-Joachim Peters, Michal Kamil Simon, and Elvin Alin Sindrilaru, CERN, Esplanade des Particules 1, 1217 Meyrin, Geneva, Switzerland.

Abstract: “The storage group of CERN IT operates more than 20 individual EOS [1] storage services with a raw data storage volume of more than 340PB. Storage space is a major cost factor in HEP computing and the planned future LHC Run 3 and 4 increase storage space demands by at least an order of magnitude.“

“A cost effective storage model providing durability is Erasure Coding (EC) [2]. The decommissioning of CERN’s remote computer center (Wigner/Budapest) allows a reconsideration of the currently configured dual-replica strategy where EOS provides one replica in each computer center.“

“EOS allows one to configure EC on a per file bases and exposes four different redundancy levels with single, dual, triple and fourfold parity to select different quality of service and variable costs.“

“This paper will highlight tests which have been performed to migrate files on a production instance from dual-replica to various EC profiles. It will discuss performance and operational impact, and highlight various policy scenarios to select the best file layout with respect to IO patterns, file age and file size.“

“We will conclude with the current status and future optimizations, an evaluation of cost savings and discuss an erasure encoded EOS setup as a possible tape storage replacement.“

© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.