What is Erasure Encoding?

This provides an environment with fewer errors. Moreover, it can also be described as a structure of a data distribution algorithm that enables data to be distributed across several storage devices.

Erasure codes are able to perform at several phases of coherency. The concept behind it is instead of writing the information to store in its entirety, it is divided into smaller portions. The portions are utilized to rebuild the initial information if required.

The main benefit of the erasure encoding is that it can be decoded even if a few blocks go missing. It is utilized in several interaction networks to increase the reliability against transmission failures.

For instance, the whole document can be encoded as K chunks, or a file system block can be encoded as K singular blocks.

Advantages of Erasure Encoding

There are a lot of features of erasure encoding that make the concept appealing as opposed to different information-keeping techniques.

The most notable features are:

• Speed - when erasure encoding is used instead of other approaches, the time necessary to recover from a single error is substantially less.
• Reliability - because it only saves chunks of data, the original can be restored even if a portion of the storage media fails.
• Versatility - this approach can handle little and huge volumes of data.
• Cost-effective - when you include the cost savings linked with not having to buy extra backup and recovery software, this strategy is cost-effective.

To specify, erasure coding is an easy technique of storing information in a secure manner that can be utilized to recover the initial information. 

Differences Between RAID and Erasure Encoding

RAID and erasure encoding are often seen as the same things. However, they are quite different.

RAID, for example, is commonly used for servers and other big storage devices. It replicates your information over numerous hard drives. This provides a backup if one disk dies. The disadvantage is that it costs more than erasure encoding and takes up more space on each device.

However, it does not safeguard the information on your disks from being viewed by another computer. Anyone who obtains one of the drives may still access all of your data.

Erasure encoding, on the other hand, separates the information so that it cannot be seen without the appropriate key. To be more specific, it divides the information into parts, stretches it, and encodes it with redundant data.

So, the main difference is that the information isn’t divided in RAID.