We initiate the study of DNA-based distributed storage systems, where information is encoded across multiple DNA data storage containers to achieve robustness against container failures. In this setting, data are distributed over $M$ containers, and the objective is to guarantee that the contents of any failed container can be reliably reconstructed from the surviving ones. Unlike classical distributed storage systems, DNA data storage containers are fundamentally constrained by sequencing technology, since each read operation yields the content of a uniformly random sampled strand from the container. Within this framework, we consider several erasure-correcting codes and analyze the expected recovery time of the data stored in a failed container. Our results are obtained by analyzing generalized versions of the classical Coupon Collector's Problem, which may be of independent interest.

翻译：我们首次研究了基于DNA的分布式存储系统，其中信息被编码存储在多个DNA数据存储容器中，以实现对容器故障的鲁棒性。在此设置中，数据分布在$M$个容器上，目标是确保任何故障容器的内容都能从存活的容器中可靠地重建。与经典分布式存储系统不同，DNA数据存储容器从根本上受到测序技术的限制，因为每次读取操作只能获得从容器中均匀随机采样的一条链的内容。在此框架下，我们考虑了几种纠删码，并分析了存储在故障容器中数据的期望恢复时间。我们的结果是通过分析经典"优惠券收集问题"的广义版本得到的，这可能具有独立的学术价值。