Preparing for Future Data Center Professionals: Integrating Storage Technology Into the Computer Information Technology Curriculum
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Session S2E Preparing for Future Data Center Professionals: Integrating Storage Technology into the Computer Information Technology Curriculum Wei Hao, Hetal Jasani, Traian Marius Truta Northern Kentucky University, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract -Information brings economic value to the To address the above problems, we have developed a new customers and data is the "soul" of the enterprise. Data course entitled CIT 465/565 - Storage Administration, for centers are playing more and more important roles in senior undergraduate students majoring in CIT and for the enterprises. Storage technology is one of the graduate students in the Master of Science in Computer fundamental technologies behind data centers. The Information Technology (MSCIT) at NKU. Since both our storage knowledge and skills are needed for data center CIT programs emphasize the hands-on learning, we have professionals. Thus, we have developed a new course, developed not only lecture components but also laboratory components for the course. The lecture components are Storage Administration, for Computer Information designed to cover three parts: storage fundamentals, storage Technology (CIT) major students at Northern Kentucky networks, and emerging technologies and data centers. The University (NKU). Since our CIT program emphasizes storage fundamentals part focuses on the fundamental hands-on learning, we have developed the course based storage concepts, such as storage devices, disk interfaces, on hands-on laboratory components. The laboratory disk geometry, disk partitions, disk performance, files components are developed based on open source systems, Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID), software and simulator software. In this paper, we hot swap, Logical Volume Management (LVM), and storage describe the hands-on laboratory components in details. planning. The storage networks part emphasizes on Direct- Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), Network-Attached Storage (NAS), Network File System Index Terms – Storage Technology, CIT Education, Lab (NFS), Common Internet File System (CIFS), IP-SAN, Modules. Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), and 1. INTRODUCTION Content-Addressed Storage (CAS). The emerging technologies and data centers part covers virtualization, The demand for data fuels the expansion of storage storage virtualization, data center, and Cloud computing. requirements beyond traditional corporate databases and Correspondingly, three laboratory modules are designed for data warehouses. The International Data Corporation (IDC) those three parts. The lab module 1 is designed for the research [1] shows that the digital universe information that storage fundamentals part. It includes a hard disk is either created, captured, or replicated in digital form was installation lab, a disk performance monitoring and testing 281 Exabytes in 2007. In 2011, the amount of digital lab, and a software RAID and LVM lab. The lab module 2 information produced in the year should equal nearly 1,800 is designed for the storage networks part. It includes an Exabytes, or 6 times that produced in 2007. Storage EMC Navisphere Manager Simulator lab and Openfiler technology is playing a more and more important role in IT. labs. The lab module 3 is designed for the emerging A few universities had offered storage technology courses technologies and data centers part. It includes a [2, 3, 4, and 5]. In general their approaches were theory virtualization lab, a network optimization lab, and a Cloud heavy and these courses failed to deliver hands-on based computing lab. laboratory experience for students. Hands-on labs can help We successfully offered this course in Fall 2010. At the end students better understand and apply what they have learned of the course, student evaluations showed students have not during the class lectures. A second drawback of the exiting only learned storage concepts but also gained hands-on courses is that the emerging technologies, such as experience on how to manage storage systems. The students virtualization and Cloud computing, were not taught at all. liked this course, especially hands-on lab modules. The These emerging technologies are changing the way future hands-on labs helped students better understand the storage data centers are built, configured, and operated. The new technologies. In this paper, we discuss our hands-on lab knowledge and skills required for future data center modules. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: the professionals are not taught by current storage curriculum. related work is described in Section 2. In Section 3, we describe the lab module 1 consisting of lab exercises on 978-1-61284-469-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE October 12 - 15, 2011, Rapid City, SD 41st ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference S2E-1 Session S2E storage fundamentals. We present the lab module 2 on introduce smartmontools [6] to students in this lab. Self- storage networks in Section 4. Section 5 discusses the lab Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology module 3, which includes the labs on emerging technologies (S.M.A.R.T.) is a system in hard disks designed to report and data centers. Section 6 summarizes the paper. conditions that may indicate impending failure. Smartmontools is a free software package that can monitor 2. RELATED WORK S.M.A.R.T. attributes and run hard drive self-tests. The Several universities had offered storage-related courses into purpose of S.M.A.R.T. is to warn a system administrator of their undergraduate curricula. Michigan Technological impending drive failure while there is still time to take University offered one such course entitled "Storage Area action, such as copying the data to a replacement device. Networking" [2]. This class covered the dominant mass Smartmontool comes with two programs: smartctl, which is storage technologies, specifically rotating magnetic and meant for interactive use, and smartd, which continuously optical media. It also covered the distributed network monitors S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In the lab, we ask students storage methods, such as iSCSI, DAS, NAS, and SAN to use smartctl to enable S.M.A.R.T. support and offline technologies. Pennsylvania State University offered one data collection on the disk, check the overall health of the course named "Designing High Availability Information disk, run a self-test on the disk, and set up smartd to do tests Management and Storage Architectures" [3]. It focused on automatically. the concepts of DAS, NAS, SAN, and various SAN Storage planning is another responsibility of the storage topologies. It also covered Fibre Channel architecture, administrator. In order to do good planning, the Storage-over-IP technologies, such as Fibre Channel over administrator needs to understand the performance of IP (FCIP), Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP), iSCSI, storage devices. For example, if an application requires 1TB and InfiniBand. Georgia Southern University offered of storage capacity and performs 5000 IOPS (Input/output another course called "Storage Technologies" [4]. This Operations per Second), then the storage administrator course included modern storage infrastructure technologies needs to determine the number of disks need to meet the such as SAN, NAS, DAS, CAS, storage virtualization application requirements. In this lab, we introduce several technologies, local and remote replication, backup and open-source disk performance test tools to students. They recovery. Same faculty presented another storage are hdparm [7], iostat [8], and iometer [9] tools. We ask technology course [5]. The course topics included I/O students to use those tools to measure the performance of system, minimal elements of queuing theory, storage different storage devices, such as SATA drive, SCSI drive, networking protocols, common information model, storage and USB drives. Based on the measurements, students plot area protocols (iSCSI, iFCP, FCIP), business continuity, and graphs to compare read/write and sequential/random access disaster recovery. rates among different storage devices. 3. LAB MODULE 1: STORAGE FUNDAMENTAL LABS 3. Software RAID, Hot Swap, and LVM The primary objective of lab module 1 is to understand the RAID is a typical setup for storage systems. Storage fundamental concepts of storage. This lab module consists administrators need to hot swap a bad disk during the run of three hands-on lab exercises. This module includes a hard time. Buying servers with hardware RAID and hot swap disk installation lab, a disk performance monitoring and support is expensive. To save cost, we design a software testing lab, and a software RAID and LVM lab. RAID lab that simulates a more costly hardware RAID environment. The software and materials used in the lab 1. Hard Disk Installation on a Linux Machine include one PC, one Ubuntu 10.0.4 live CD, three 4GB USB To prepare for a storage administrator career, the students flash drives. The first part of this lab is about RAID need to know how to install a new disk. We design this lab 1(Mirror) configuration and hotswap. First, students boot up to help students become familiar with the hard disk the PC with the Ubuntu live CD and then download and installation procedure on a Linux machine. The procedure install mdadm package [10]. Second, they connect two USB for adding a new disk involves the following steps: (1) drives to the PC. The USB drives appear as the SCSI connecting the disk to an HBA (Host Bus Adapter) and devices on Ubuntu, such as /dev/sdb1 (the first USB drive) BIOS setup for the disk; (2) partitioning the disk; (3) and /dev/sdc1 (the second USB drive). A RAID 1 array is creating filesystems within disk partitions; (4) mounting the created on the partitions of the two USB drives via mdadm - filesystems; (5) setting up automatic mounting; (6) labeling -create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 disk partitions; (7) setting up swapping on swap partitions. /dev/sdc1. Third, the students check the RAID status while The software and materials used for this lab includes one the RAID 1 is building.