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Overview
Storage is becoming ubiquitous. Disk drives are now commonplace in numerous consumer electronics products including DVRs, personal juke-boxes, gaming devices, etc. At the other end, the growth of data-centric services, whether it be for file and transaction processing within an enterprise, or for the growing number of internet-based services, is making us increasingly reliant on the storage systems. The storage system is no longer just the disks, but includes an extensive (and expensive) hierarchy ranging from high speed disks on one end, large client caches on another, and a high performance interconnect between the two. It is important to understand all these levels of the storage hierarchy when designing and deploying storage devices for production environments. Further, while performance has traditionally been the primary criterion for optimization, there are several other emerging metrics of importance, including the power consumption, reliability, availability and manageability. This course will cover all these aspects of storage systems. The goal is to not just understand the state-of-the-art in these topics but to also identify issues for further research.

Handout for the course in PDF format.