Last week we had a large and highly-engaged audience at our live Webcast: “SMB 3.0 – New Opportunities for Windows Environments.” We ran out of time answering all the questions during our event so, as promised, here is a recap of all the questions and answers to attendees’ questions. The Webcast is now available on demand at http://snia.org/forums/esf/knowledge/webcasts. You can also download a copy of the presentation slides there.

Q. Have you tested SMB Direct over 40Gb Ethernet or using RDMA?

A. SMB Direct has been demonstrated using 40Gb Ethernet using TCP or RDMA and Infiniband using RDMA.

Q. 100 … Read the rest

SUSE, founded in 1992, provides an enterprise ready Linux distribution in the form of SLES; the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. As of late last month (October 22, 2013), SUSE announced that SLES 11 with service pack 3 now supports the Linux client for NFSv4.1 and pNFS client. This major distribution joins RedHat’s RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux) 6.4 in supporting enterprise quality Linux distributions with support for files based NFSv4.1 and pNFS.

For the adventurous, block and object pNFS support is available in the upstream kernel. Most regularly maintained distributions based on a Linux 3.1 or better kernel (if not … Read the rest

In this third and final blog post on NFS (see previous blog posts Why NFSv4.1 and pNFS are Better than NFSv3 Could Ever Be and The Advantages of NFSv4.1) I’ll cover pNFS (parallel NFS), an optional feature of NFSv4.1 that improves the bandwidth available for NFS protocol access, and some of the proposed features of NFSv4.2 – some of which are already implemented in commercially available servers, but will be standardized with the ratification of NFSv4.2 (for details, see the IETF NFSv4.2 draft documents).

Finally, I’ll point out where you can get NFSv4.1 clients with support for pNFS … Read the rest

In a previous blog post Why NFSv4.1 and pNFS are Better than NFSv3 Could Ever Be, some of the issues with NFSv3 that made it difficult to implement as a WAN based or data center wide protocol were discussed. The question then becomes; why not move to NFSv4 instead of NFSv4.1? Isn’t that a bigger leap from NFSv3?

Well, practical experience and some issues with NFSv4 made NFSv4.1 a necessity; for one, it introduces the key concept of sessions, and provides a foundation for pNFS (parallel NFS) which we’ll discuss in a later blog post. And all the features … Read the rest

NFSv4 has been a standard file sharing protocol since 2003, but has not been widely adopted; party because NFSv3 was “just good enough”. Yet, NFSv4 improves on NFSv3 in many important ways; and NFSv4.1 is a further improvement on that. In this post, I explain the how NFSv4.1 is better suited to a wide range of datacenter and HPC use than its predecessor NFSv3 and NFSv4, as well as providing resources for migrating from NFSv3 to NFSv4.1. And, most importantly, I make the argument that users should, at the very least, be evaluating and deploying NFSv4.1 for use in new … Read the rest

Our recent Webcast: NFSv4.1 – Plan for a Smooth Migration was very well received and well attended. We thank everyone who was able to make the live event. For those of you who couldn’t make it, it’s now available on demand. Check it out here.

There wasn’t enough time to respond to all of the questions during the Webcast, so we have consolidated answers to all of them in this blog post from the presentation team. Feel free to comment and provide your input.

Q. Will NFS 4.2 be any easier to migrate to than 4.1? Would it be … Read the rest

“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”
Douglas Adams (1952-2001, English humorist, writer and dramatist)

While there have been many advances and improvements to NFS over the last decade, some IT organizations have elected to continue with NFSv3 – like potatoes, it’s the staple filesystem protocol that just about any UNIX administrator understands.

Although adequate for many purposes and a familiar and well understood protocol, choosing and continuing to deploy NFSv3 has become increasingly difficult to justify in a modern datacenter. For example, NFSv3 makes promiscuous use of ports, something that is … Read the rest