Storage Systems: CSE 228B

Digital storage has become a dominant feature in computation and information transfer. Even thought the costs of storage are rapidly diminishing, mankind is creating information at an ever increasing rate. Much of this information will be transferred at rated that far exceed the possibilities of disk drives; disk arrays provide parallelism for rapid transfers as well as reliability for information held in trust. We consider a variety of different applications including transaction processing and video servers with vastly distinct workload characteristics. Data layout architectures for disk arrays (RAID) are presented and analyzed. The ever increasing volume of information to be stored necessitates ever increasing storage facilities. Approaches for this problem will be explored. The course presents topics in storage system architectures and features both descriptive and analytic coverage. We will highlight some very interesting work recently completed within our Gemini Storage Systems Laboratory. We will initially cover the ``traditional'' topics on disk array architectures including the RAID classification, reliability estimation, and run-time performance.

This will be a lecture course with homeworks, a midterm examination and a final project.

Prerequisites for this course include a reasonable systems background as well as interest in storage. This course will not feature software project homeworks but this is certainly possible.

There is a strong possibility of summer employment beginning during the summer of 1997. Many of the topics covered within this seminar will be directly applicable to this work. Details will be available as they become more definite.

The storage area currently, and for the foreseeable future, is providing numerous employment opportunities for Computer Science and Engineering systems students. Knowledge of the area is a prerequisite to obtain these opportunities.

REFERENCE MATERIALS April 1997

Gemini Storage Systems Laboratory December 1995