Data centres are one of the backbones of modern-day digital
infrastructure, with the amount of processed and stored data growing
year by year. In this context, coding techniques are employed to ensure
the availability and reliability of the stored data. One question that
has recently emerged, is how to optimally store a certain number of data
objects on a certain number of servers in a way that allows the system
to serve certain amounts of requests for the objects. This problem is
naturally phrased as a coding question, as it concerns the design of a
redundancy strategy for the storage system. In this talk, we will
introduce and formalize the service problem and the Service Rate Region
as a measure of system flexibility. Connection to other well-established
research topics will be outlined, such as PIR/batch codes and Majority
Logic Decoding. The difference between systematic and non-systematic
systems will be considered, and we will show how the latter can give a
better performance when designed carefully.