  To harness the ever growing capacity and decreasing cost of storage,
providing an abstraction of dependable storage in the presence of crash-stop
and Byzantine failures is compulsory. We propose a decentralized Reed Solomon
coding mechanism with minimum communication overhead. Using a progressive data
retrieval scheme, a data collector contacts only the necessary number of
storage nodes needed to guarantee data integrity. The scheme gracefully adapts
the cost of successful data retrieval to the number of storage node failures.
Moreover, by leveraging the Welch-Berlekamp algorithm, it avoids unnecessary
computations. Compared to the state-of-the-art decoding scheme, the
implementation and evaluation results show that our progressive data retrieval
scheme has up to 35 times better computation performance for low Byzantine node
rates. Additionally, the communication cost in data retrieval is derived
analytically and corroborated by Monte-Carlo simulation results. Our
implementation is flexible in that the level of redundancy it provides is
independent of the number of data generating nodes, a requirement for
distributed storage systems
