SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DATA PROTECTION WITH MULTIDIMENSIONAL PARITY

摘要

A high availability, high reliability storage system (215) that leverages rapid advances in commodity computing devices and the robust nature of internetwork technology such as the Internet (213). A system of parity distribution (505) in accordance with the present invention allows for great er fault tolerance and levels of storage efficiency than possible with conventional RAID (levels 0-5) paradigms. Data can be recovered or made available even in the case of loss of N, N+1, or more devices or storage elements (215) over which stripes of the data set have been distributed or partitioned. The present invention provides a parity distribution that can b e used to distribute data stored in a single storage device or across multiple connected or otherwise networked devices.