Advantages of erasure coding

• Saving storage: Data which terms as cold data still takes 200 percent extra space on HDFS. Erasure coding reduces the storage overhead for data by more than 50%. 
• Configurable policy: Admin can mark data as hot or cold by just running simple command. Data marked as hot will be replicated according to replication factor configured. 
• Easily recoverable: Even if some percentage of data is lost, with the help of erasure code one can easily recover it.