Nutanix Certified Associate Practice Exam

Erasure coding in storage systems primarily provides what benefit?

1. Faster data retrieval speeds

2. Redundancy and fault tolerance

3. Decreased data storage space requirements

The correct answer is: Redundancy and fault tolerance

The primary benefit of erasure coding in storage systems is redundancy and fault tolerance. This technology enhances data protection by breaking data into smaller fragments, expanding them with additional redundant pieces, and distributing them across different storage locations. In the event of hardware failures or data corruption, erasure coding enables the system to reconstruct the original data from the remaining fragments. This means that erasure coding allows a system to tolerate a number of failures without losing any data, thus significantly improving the overall reliability and integrity of data within the storage infrastructure. While reduced data storage space requirements can occur in specific scenarios, the hallmark of erasure coding is its ability to provide robustness against data loss. Similarly, while it may improve data retrieval speeds in certain configurations, its primary purpose is to enhance redundancy and fault tolerance rather than to optimize performance. Therefore, the essential focus of erasure coding lies in its capacity to ensure that data remains accessible and safe, reinforcing the importance of redundancy in modern data storage solutions.