Having redundant copies of your data can be important. Erasure coding is a unique protection technology in backup and enterprise NAS storage systems protecting data from disk, controller, and even site failure. It’s useful for protecting cold storage and primary production workloads in some environments.
In this article, we will see how erasure coding can benefit NAS storage management in data centers.
What is eraser coding, and how does it work in NAS storage?
Erasure Coding solution provides data protection to ensure data integrity and security. Erasure Coding technology has been adapted for high-performance enterprise storage to provide enterprise-class data durability, reliability, and fault tolerance.
The benefit of erasure coding in NAS storage
While RAID is still an effective tool to protect data, EC offers several important advantages that must be considered when planning storage for data. StoneFly offers erasure coding supported Network Attached Storage appliances with support for deduplication, cloud connect and snapshot replication to make it even easier to manage your data center.
A higher degree of flexibility for NAS Storage
RAID tends to be restricted to relatively fixed configurations. Although some vendors use custom RAID configurations, the majority of RAID implementations are quite typical. Erasure code is typically implemented in the best NAS systems and provides a lot more flexibility. Businesses can choose the data-to parity ratio that is most appropriate for their needs and the requirements for storage systems.
Greater endurance against failures.
Erasure coding enables an organization to design a storage system with the highest reliability and endurance. For instance, Amazon S3, is designed to offer endurance across several zones of availability. Furthermore, as opposed to RAID 6, which can only handle two simultaneous failures of disks, an EC-based system can handle even more.
More efficient use of resources.
Replication techniques such as RAID 1 mirroring use a significant portion of storage capacity to store data copies. Erasure coding is a great way to decrease the storage requirements and still protect the data. The precise amount of the savings is contingent on the configuration; however, it’ll still lead to improved NAS storage efficiency and lower costs for storage.
Lower risk of losing data.
When a RAID array comprises large capacity NAS storage disks, repairing the failed drive may take a long time which can increase the risk of data loss should a second failure occur before the initial one is rebuilt. Erasure coding can deal with many different disk failures simultaneously, dependent on the encoding configuration, which means there is less chance of data loss if the drive fails.
Bottom Line
Erasure coding (EC) is a storage design technology that enables storage architects and vendors to utilize fewer, larger-capacity drives to meet the demands of enterprise data centers. This article shows how utilizing EC maximizes flexibility, capacity, and business continuity while reducing costs for NAS users. It is also known as forwarding error correction code technology and has been adapted for NAS solutions, helping to protect your data from a drive failure or corruption of data.
