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Systems & Data Center · Advanced

Erasure Coding

A data protection method that splits data into fragments with parity fragments distributed across nodes or drives, rebuilding from any sufficient subset.

Definition

Erasure coding, expressed as k+m (data plus parity), offers better capacity efficiency than replication for the same fault tolerance, at the cost of CPU and rebuild traffic. It is used by object stores, vSAN RAID 5/6 and Nutanix EC-X.

Example

A 4+2 scheme survives two failures with 67 percent capacity efficiency.

Exam tip

Erasure coding saves capacity versus mirroring but increases write and rebuild overhead.

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