Modern large-scale datacenters require the seamless integration of different components - applications, computation nodes, storage devices, and networks - into one computing infrastructure. The course covers the basics of current datacenters architectures, ranging from the analysis of the single components to the global infrastructure. The focus is on the foundations required to understand the design of computing infrastructures that are scalable, available, secure and flexible at the same time. Virtualization, cloud computing and storage systems are analyzed in depth to show how they can be used to support challenging tasks such as big-data applications and high-performance computing.

Topics

1. Reliability and availability od datacenters: definitions, fundamental laws, reliability block diagranms
2. Scalability and performance of datacenters: definitions, fundamental laws, basic of queuing network theory
3. Storage systems: RAID architectures
4. Virtualization: basic concepts, technologies, hypervisors, hardware support, vm scheduling
   
5. Cloud Computing: definitions and basic concepts

The evaluation consists of a written exam on the topics covered in the course. The exam will include both theoretical questions and exercises.