Overview

Lecture location: Teer 106 or via Zoom (see Piazza for link)
Lecture time: Mon/Wed, 10:15am - 11:30am

Instructor: Dr. Tyler Bletsch
Email: Tyler.Bletsch AT duke.edu
Office Hours: After class or by appointment (feel free to email me)

Teaching Assistant: Xiaoxuan Yang (xiaoxuan.yang1 AT duke.edu)
TA Office Hours: By appointment

Links:

• Piazza forum - get help and discuss course material
• Sakai - submit code and see grades
• GradeScope - submit homework/lab assignments and get feedback
• Feedback form - send anonymous feedback to the instructor
• Rules for access to FitzWest Datacenter - must agree electronically to gain datacenter access

Schedule

#	Date	Lecture	Assignment due (11:55:00pm)	Project due (11:55:00pm)
1	Mon 8/17	Course introduction and storage system overview
2	Wed 8/19	Storage system overview, continued
3	Mon 8/24	Hard disks, SSDs, and the I/O subsystem	FitzWest Datacenter Rules Agreement
4	Wed 8/26	Hard disks, SSDs, and the I/O subsystem
5	Mon 8/31	Hard disks, SSDs, and the I/O subsystem
6	Wed 9/2	Hardware failure in storage devices	Lab 0 Resources:   - DRAC firmware   - iDRAC6 setup
7	Mon 9/7	RAID
8	Wed 9/9	RAID	Program: FUSE
9	Mon 9/14	Network-Attached Storage (NAS)	(Tue 9/15) Homework 1, Lab 1
10	Wed 9/16	Storage Area Network (SAN)
11	Mon 9/21	Filesystems
12	Wed 9/23	Filesystems	(Fri 9/25) Program: BUSE
13	Mon 9/28	Storage efficiency
14	Wed 9/30	Lecture catch-up and project discussion (Project planning slides)	(Fri 10/2) Homework 2, Lab 2
15	Mon 10/5	Business continuity: High availability		Project proposal draft due; meeting scheduled  Draft meetings: 10/6 - 10/9
16	Wed 10/7	Midterm review; Business continuity: High availability		(Fri 10/9) Project proposal due
17	Mon 10/12	Business continuity: Disaster recovery At-home midterm exam Opens: 10/12 at 12pm ET   ↳ Closes: 10/13 at 11:59pm ET (36 hours)   ↳ Work time once opened: 2 hours
18	Wed 10/14	Business continuity: Disaster recovery
19	Mon 10/19	Virtual environments
20	Wed 10/21	Project workday and milestone demo		(8:00AM) Project milestone 1 due
21	Mon 10/26	Cloud	Lab 3
22	Wed 10/28	Workload profiling and sizing	Homework 3
23	Mon 11/2	Project workday and milestone demo		(8:00AM) Project milestone 2 due
24	Wed 11/4	Security
25	Mon 11/9	Data forensics and recovery		Project demos scheduled
26	Wed 11/11	Next-gen storage technologies	(Fri 11/13) Homework 4, Lab 4	Demo meetings: 11/11 - 11/16
27	Mon 11/16	Project final presentations ^ (Online only - no in-class presence)		Project materials due
	Mon 11/23- Tue 11/24	At-home final exam Opens: 11/23 at 12pm ET   ↳ Closes: 11/24 at 11:59pm ET (36 hours)   ↳ Work time once opened: 3 hours

Syllabus & policies

Course synopsis

A chance to study the design and deployment of massive storage systems of the sort used in large enterprises (banks, major IT departments, service providers, etc.). Includes coverage of hard disk and flash design, RAID, SAN and NAS topologies, filesystem design, data center architectures for high availability, data deduplication, business continuity, power aware storage, and the economics of data storage with respect to cloud computing.

Assignments include hands-on lab work with physical servers, some pen-and-paper problems, and semester-long programming project.

Pre-requisites for grad students: ECE 650 (Systems Programming and Engineering) or instructor consent.

Pre-requisites for undergrad students: Computer Science 310/ECE 353 (Operating Systems). Will also need basic networking knowledge (IP addressing, that network switches exist, layer 2 vs layer 3). This can be provided by ECE/COMPSCI 356 (Network Architecture), personal experience, or self-education in parallel with the course.

If you feel you have an OS and networking background but are missing the above pre-reqs, just contact me.

Grading breakdown

This course will require a semester-long project, homework assignments, and a midterm+final exam. Grading breakdown:

Category	%
Project proposal draft	2%
Project proposal	3%
Project milestone 1	5%
Project milestone 2	5%
Project final report	5%
Project final presentation	5%
Project final demo	15%
Homeworks/programs/labs	40%
Midterm exam	10%
Final exam	10%

Homework and Labs

There are two kinds of regular assigments, homeworks and labs:

• Homeworks are individual and include written exercises to grow your understanding of the theory.
• Labs are group work that include hands-on tasks to do with real storage equipment.

In either case, you are free to discuss concepts covered in the class with others (other groups for lab work and other people for individual homework), but should not share answers or concrete steps oustide the bounds of academic integrity.

Late homework/lab submissions incur penalties as follows:

• Submission is 0-24 hours late: total score is multiplied by 0.9
• Submission is 24-48 hours late: total score is multiplied by 0.8
• Submission is more than 48 hours late: total score is multiplied by the Planck constant (as measured in J·s)

NOTE: If you feel in advance that you may need an extension, contact the instructor. We can work with you if you see a scheduling problem coming, but extensions cannot be granted at or near the due date!

Your homework/lab grade will be based on what you submit to Sakai and when you submit it.

Student servers

To support experimentation on real hardware, several storage servers have been procured. Students will split into groups of ~3 and each will be assigned a server. Homeworks will guide students through physically examining, racking, installing, configuring, and using the servers in realistic scenarios.

Some of the hardware is a little dated, but it will exhibit all the usual performance trends, and it has the drives to experiment with RAID topologies, hybrid HDD+SSD storage, filesystem performance, and more. Budget does exist for upgrades if needed (e.g., adding a modern HDD for a comparitive performance study).

The servers will start out in Hudson 06, but after setting them up, students will install these servers into a standard four-post rack. For this purpose, rack space has been set aside in the "FitzWest" data center in the basement of CIEMAS; students will be granted badge access to this space for this purpose.

NOTE: FitzWest is a real production data center for Duke. Students must exercise caution when working in this space, taking care not to disturb operations of other systems.

In order to guide students through the early phases of server configuration, a few out-of-class lab sessions will be scheduled at a mutually agreeable time. Once servers are configured and deployed properly, all subsequent operations should be able to be conducted over the internet. However, if a physical malfunction occurs (such as drive failure or accidentally trashing the installed OS), students may need to do in-place maintenence of their server within its FitzWest rack.

Any major hardware failures should be reported to the course instructor.

Grade appeals

All regrade requests must be in writing. Email the TA with your questions. After speaking with the TA, if you still have concerns, contact the instructor.

All regrade requests must be submitted to the instructor no later than 1 week after the assignment was returned to you.

Academic integrity

I take academic integrity extremely seriously. Academic misconduct will not be tolerated, and all suspected violations of the Duke Honor Code will be referred to the Office of Student Conduct (for undergraduates) or the departmental Director of Graduate Studies (for graduate students). A student found responsible for academic dishonesty faces formal disciplinary action, which may include suspension. A student twice suspended automatically faces a minimum 5-year separation from Duke University.

In addition to the measures taken by the university, the affected assignment(s) will receive zero credit, or possibly -100% in egregious cases.

If you are considering this course of action, please see me instead, and we can work something out! I want every student in my course to be successful.