Elastic Reed-Solomon Codes for Efficient Redundancy Transitioning in Distributed Key-Value Stores

Modern distributed key-value (KV) stores increasingly adopt erasure coding to reliably store data. To adapt to the changing demands on access performance and reliability requirements, distributed KV stores perform redundancy transitioning by tuning the redundancy schemes with different coding parameters. However, redundancy transitioning incurs extensive network I/Os, which impair the performance of distributed KV stores. We propose a new family of erasure codes, called Elastic Reed-Solomon (ERS) codes, whose primary goal is to mitigate network I/Os in redundancy transitioning. ERS codes eliminate data block relocation, while limiting network I/Os for parity block updates via the new co-design of encoding matrix construction and data placement. ERS codes achieve such gains in both forward and backward transitioning scenarios. We realize ERS codes in a distributed KV store prototype based on Memcached, and show via testbed experiments in both local and cloud environments that ERS codes significantly reduce the latency of redundancy transitioning compared with state-of-the-arts.