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Anyone following the latest news on Network File System (NFS) 4.1 knows that it moved from Last Call to Request for Comment status at the Internet Engineering Task Force.
There was a lot of press about how Parallel NFS (pNFS), included in the protocol, would create a quantum leap in network-attached storage (NAS) performance for bandwidth-intensive applications like those used in high-performance computing (HPC) applications.
NFS 4.1 represents a major step in enabling NFS to better serve the throughput needs driven by ever-increasing file sizes and demanding HPC environments.
While the majority of the buzz has died down on pNFS, vendors are developing solutions that incorporate the standard and pNFS. Supporting products will be on
the market in approximately six months. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) projects that by 2012 file-based data will make up more than 70% of total storage capacity. The benefits of pNFS are becoming more important to storage administrators and IT departments.
One of the key challenges with NFS is that performance is gated by the bandwidth of the NAS head or processor node that controls, or “owns,” the directory and file being accessed. NFS 4.0 limits file ownership to a single node (there are ways to get around single-node ownership, but not without tradeoffs). When a file is requested by a client, all data delivered to the client must be routed through the NAS head. The NFS 4.1 represents a major step in enabling NFS to better serve the throughput needs driven by ever-increasing file sizes and demanding HPC environments.
For more information on this project and its status see pNFS.
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