Distributed storage systems apply erasure-tolerant codes to guaranteereliable access to data despite failures of storage resources.While many codes can be mapped to XOR operations andefficiently implemented on common microprocessors, only a certainnumber of codes are usually implemented in a certain system(out of a wide variety of different codes).The ability to include new codes easily, to exchange codes and finally to select codesfor several types of data is desirable.To provide this flexibility, a parameterization is used which??allows thedefinition of different XOR based codes, and beyond different styles of en- anddecoding. The parameters include (i) the assignment of data and redundancyelements to the storage resources and (ii) a description of en- and decodingalgorithms with XOR based equations.The parameters of a certain code can be changed and in additiona wide variety of codes can be described and included in a storage systemimplementation. The proposed parameterization adopts the ability of??codeslike EVENODD, Cauchy-R/S and HoVer codes to map to distributed resources.Furthermore, en- and decoding algorithms can be described differently,either for minimal coding costor for minimal coding time on parallel systems.