Patent ID: 7840679

Claim:
A method for generating fragment requests on behalf of an assembling device, comprising: receiving, by a relay server from the assembling device, a requirement to receive a certain set of erasure-coded fragments; wherein erasure-coding denotes a process in which a sequence of erasure-coded fragments are generated from a segment such that the segment can be reconstructed from essentially any subset of the erasure-coded fragments having minimum size not smaller than the size of the segment; selecting, by the relay server, fractional-storage servers that together meet the requirement; wherein each fractional-storage server configured to store at least one erasure-coded fragment but less than the minimum amount of fragments or data required to reconstruct the segments; and transmitting, by the relay server to the selected servers, on behalf of the assembling device, a plurality of requests for the required fragments, wherein the required fragments are to be delivered from the fractional-storage servers to the assembling device not via the relay server.