This is an archive of a course I taught Spring 2024, preserved here as a resource for future students.

ECE 566: Enterprise Storage Architecture

Section 01, Spring 2024


The invention of RAID probably ruined this guy's life.

Overview

Lecture location: Hudson 207
Lecture time: Tue/Thu, 10:05am - 11:20am

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

Teaching Assistant: Hangming Ye (hangming.ye AT duke.edu)
TA Office Hours: See here

Links:

Schedule

#DateLectureAssignment due
(11:59:00pm)
Project due
(11:59:00pm)
1 Thu 1/11 Course introduction and storage system overview
2 Tue 1/16 Storage system overview, continued
3 Thu 1/18 Hard disks, SSDs, and the I/O subsystem (Thu 1/18)
FitzWest Datacenter
Rules Agreement
Fri 1/19, 11am-12:30pm
Hudson 215

Lab 0 session #1
4 Tue 1/23 Hard disks, SSDs, and the I/O subsystem
5 Thu 1/25 Hard disks, SSDs, and the I/O subsystem
Fri 1/26, 2pm-3:30pm
Hudson 215

Lab 0 session #2
6 Tue 1/30 Hardware failure in storage devices (Tue 1/30)
Lab 0

Resources:
  - DRAC firmware
  - iDRAC6 setup
7 Thu 2/1 RAID
8 Tue 2/6 RAID (Mon 2/5)
Lab 0.5
A litle addendum since we
skipped some steps in Lab 0


(Tue 2/6)
Program: FUSE
- bbfs-simple.tgz
9 Thu 2/8 Network-Attached Storage (NAS)
10 Tue 2/13 Storage Area Network (SAN) (Tue 2/13)
Homework 1,
Lab 1
11 Thu 2/15 Filesystems
12 Tue 2/20 Project planning discussion;
Filesystems
13 Thu 2/22 Storage efficiency (Wed 2/21)
Program: BUSE
(RAID 0 only)
(Thu 2/22)
Project proposal draft due;
meeting scheduled

14 Tue 2/27 Business continuity: High availability (Wed 2/28)
Program: BUSE
(RAID 4 and report)
(2/26 - 3/1)
Project draft meetings
15 Thu 2/29 Business continuity: High availability
16 Tue 3/5 Midterm review;
Business continuity: Disaster recovery
(Wed 3/6)
Homework 2
(Tue 3/5)
Project proposal due

17 Thu 3/7 Midterm exam
- Study guide
(Fri 3/8)
Lab 2
Tue 3/12 SPRING BREAK
Thu 3/14 SPRING BREAK
18 Tue 3/19 Business continuity: Disaster recovery
19 Thu 3/21 Virtual environments
20 Tue 3/26 Project workday and milestone demo (Tue 3/26, 8:00AM)
Project milestone 1 due

21 Thu 3/28 Cloud (Thu 3/28)
Lab 3

22 Tue 4/2 Workload profiling and sizing (Tue 4/2)
Homework 3

23 Thu 4/4 Project workday and milestone demo (Thu 4/4, 8:00AM)
Project milestone 2 due

24 Tue 4/9 Security
25 Thu 4/11 Data forensics and recovery (Thu 4/11)
Project demos scheduled

26 Tue 4/16 Next-gen storage technologies (Mon 4/15)
Homework 4 (gdoc),
Lab 4 (gdoc)

(4/15-4/19)
Project demo meetings
27 Thu 4/18 Project final presentations (Fri 4/19)
Project materials due

Wed 5/1 Final exam, 9:00am

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 draft2%
Project proposal3%
Project milestone 1 5%
Project milestone 2 5%
Project final report5%
Project final presentation5%
Project final demo15%
Homeworks/programs/labs40%
Midterm exam10%
Final exam10%

Homework and Labs

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

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:

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.