Non-homogeneous distributed storage systems

This paper describes a non-homogeneous distributed storage systems (DSS), where there is one super node which has a larger storage size and higher reliability and availability than the other storage nodes. We propose three distributed storage schemes based on (k+2; k) maximum distance separable (MDS) codes and non-MDS codes to show the efficiency of such non-homogeneous DSS in terms of repair efficiency and data availability. Our schemes achieve optimal bandwidth (k+1/2)(M/k) when repairing 1-node failure, but require only one fourth of the minimum required file size and can operate with a smaller field size leading to significant complexity reduction than traditional homogeneous DSS. Moreover, with non-MDS codes, our scheme can achieve an even smaller repair bandwidth of M/2k . Finally, we show that our schemes can increase the data availability by 10% than the traditional homogeneous DSS scheme.