Also how would that help with geographic redundancy? Local recovery from errors does you no good if your datacenter gets wiped out in a flood.

Disclaimer: googler, but not working on storage.

link here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

actually in colossus one can tune RS coding parameters per file, to get a tradeoff between performance/durablity.

RS coding uses less copies, but same level of safety (tradeoff is the recovery computation time.)

I can't find the presentation anywhere, but at HBaseCon 2014 one of the lead developers of Bigtable stated that they went to RS. Even for their older databases.

EDIT: In this video https://vimeo.com/100153741, around the 23 minute mark