Patent 7577866 was granted and assigned to EMC on August, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Described are techniques for performing data recovery processing for two failed devices included in a set of devices. It is determined whether the two failed devices are each one of the data devices, a horizontal parity device, or a diagonal parity device. Each of the data devices is partitioned into N−1 data segments. The horizontal parity device includes N horizontal parity segments each including parity information for a horizontal grouping of N−1 of the data segments. The diagonal parity device includes N diagonal parity segments each including parity information for a diagonal grouping of N−1 of the data segments. Recovery processing is performed to recover two failed devices in accordance with the diagonal parity device, the horizontal parity device, and the data devices.