Storage codes — Coding rate and repair locality

The repair locality of a distributed storage code is the maximum number of nodes that ever needs to be contacted during the repair of a failed node. Having small repair locality is desirable, since it is proportional to the number of disk accesses during repair. However, recent publications show that small repair locality comes with a penalty in terms of code distance or storage overhead if exact repair is required. Here, we first review some of the main results on storage codes under various repair regimes and discuss the recent work on possible (information-theoretical) trade-offs between repair locality and other code parameters like storage overhead and code distance, under the exact repair regime. Then we present some new information theoretical lower bounds on the storage overhead as a function of the repair locality, valid for all common coding and repair models. In particular, we show that if each of the n nodes in a distributed storage system has storage capacity a and if, at any time, a failed node can be functionally repaired by contacting some set of r nodes (which may depend on the actual state of the system) and downloading an amount β of data from each, then in the extreme cases where α = β or a = r β, the maximal coding rate is at most r/(r + 1) or 1/2, respectively (that is, the excess storage overhead is at least 1/r or 1, respectively).