Erasure Coding

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What Does Erasure Coding Mean?

Erasure coding (EC) is a data protection and storage process through which a data object is separated into smaller components/fragments and each of those fragments is encoded with redundant data padding. EC transforms data object fragments into larger fragments and uses the primary data object identifier to recover each fragment.

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Erasure coding is also known as forward error correction (FEC).

Techopedia Explains Erasure Coding

EC is primarily derived from a mathematical equation: n= k + m

Where:

"k" = the original data
"m" = the additional data padding
"n" = the resulting erasure coded data

This same equation can be applied to the data to recover the original amount of data. Erasure coding is primarily used in applications that have a low tolerance for data errors. This includes most data backup services and technologies including disk arrays, object-based cloud storage, archival storage and distributed data applications.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ??a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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