
Explore data storage media types, comparing hard disk drives and solid state drives as non-volatile storage, and examine NVMe, SATA, SAS, and Fibre Channel interfaces.
Discover how data centers sustain uptime and scalability with RAID storage and hot plug drives, while remote manageability and log data enable proactive, no single point of failure operations.
Explore how redundancy safeguards data availability by mirroring drives, implementing automated failover, and mitigating single points of failure such as power and network connections.
Explore data protection strategies, including backups, off-site tape storage, and disaster recovery across three data centers with synchronous data protection and automated three-way failover to prevent data loss and downtime.
Learn how direct attached storage enables scalable disk expansion with hot-plug caddies and SAS connections, including 2.5in and 3.5in drives, external disk trays, and RAID to improve capacity and performance.
Explain how RAID 0 uses striping to spread data across multiple drives, boosting performance and capacity. Note that any drive failure causes data loss, making RAID 0 unsuitable for servers.
Explore raid 5, its parity-based data protection, and how striping across disks delivers scalability, performance, and availability while highlighting the limits of single-drive failure protection.
Hardware raid offloads storage processing from the CPU to a dedicated controller, boosting performance with caching and striping. SAS backplanes and hot-pluggable drives with hot spares reduce downtime during failures.
Consolidate storage into a shared network storage system, enabling flexible disk allocation and 80% utilization via NAS over a LAN, using CIFs/SMB and NFS file sharing.
Explore storage area networks and how block storage is shared via Fibre Channel and iSCSI, including unified storage that supports NAS and SAN connectivity.
Design a unified shared storage system with dual controllers and power supplies for high availability, scale up capacity, and connect via san or nas to deliver block and file services.
Learn how scale out storage uses industry-standard servers and software to combine nodes into a single system. Deliver scalable compute and storage beyond traditional scale up, including object storage.
Explore how object storage uses rich metadata and hash checksums to ensure self-healing, scalable, multi-tenant cloud storage with fast metadata-driven search, architecture, and S3 as a de facto standard.
If you want to learn about the basics of data storage technology, read no further, simply enroll.
This is a FREE course. What do you have to lose?
If you are the more cautious type and want to know a litle more first - read on.
Data can only exist if it is stored and protected. Volumes of data are only set to grow, which means there will always be a market for data storage systems, and there will always be jobs for people to design, build, sell and manage them.
You could be fooled into thinking that data is everywhere, stored in the cloud, and is essentially free (or extremely cheap) to store and use. But even if it is in the cloud, it has to be physically stored in hardware somewhere.
This course provides an introduction to the different storage media types and how these are used inside systems which reside in datacentres.
It is a primer for data storage as well as foundational content for the wider topic of Data Management (which is covered in a follow-on course - Data Management Fundamentals).
Based on over 25 years working in the IT industry, and many of those spent teaching upcoming IT professionals, this course has beginners and more advanced practitioners in mind. The content is explained in plain language whilst covering some fairly complex topics. Rather than just sticking to an academic curriculum aligned to a specific exam, the approach is to take a more practical stance and share perspectives of someone who has been working in the industry for many years. I have also kept the scope of this course quite narrow. It is centred on data, what it is and how it is stored within datacentres.
If you want to know more about the style of the course, dive straight in - it's free. You can also see more of my work on my YouTube Channel - simply search for 2DeCipher. Here are some viewer comments:
"This is by far the most clear explanation I have been provided with ever. Thank you!"
"This is one of the best videos explaining hyperconvergence!"
"Wow, so clarifying. Thanks a lot."
"Damn well explained! Awesome!"
In this introductory course, you'll be introduced to the following topics:
Storage Drive Types
SPAMS - Characteristics of Datacentre Systems
Redundancy
Data Protection
Direct Attached Storage (DAS)
RAID 0 - Striping
RAID 5 - Striping + Parity
Hardware RAID
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
Storage Area Network (SAN) + Unified Storage
Unified Storage
Scale-Up versus Scale-Out
Object Storage