Optimal Rack-Coordinated Updates in Erasure-Coded Data Centers

Erasure coding has been extensively deployed in today’s data centers to tackle prevalent failures, yet it is prone to give rise to substantial cross-rack traffic for parity update. In this paper, we propose a new rack-coordinated update mechanism to suppress the cross-rack update traffic, which comprises two successive phases: a delta-collecting phase that collects data delta chunks, and another selective parity update phase that renews the parity chunks based on the update pattern and parity layout. We further design RackCU, an optimal rack-coordinated update solution that achieves the theoretical lower bound of the cross-rack update traffic. We finally conduct extensive evaluations, in terms of large-scale simulation and real-world data center experiments, showing that RackCU can reduce 22.1%-75.1% of the cross-rack update traffic and hence improve 34.2%-292.6% of the update throughput.