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 …Read More

Building an industry standard is a series of incremental steps – from the original concept through ratification, followed by education and promotion, and ultimately to the development of an ecosystem of solutions. For a number of years the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) has been successfully advocating and promoting the NFSv4.1 standard and pNFS extensions. …Read More

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 …Read More

NFSv4.1 is a mature and stable protocol with many advantages over NFSv3 in meeting the demands being placed on storage by exploding data growth. Now is the time to plan for a smooth migration. I encourage you to register for our live Webcast on August 28th at http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/52927. My colleague, Alex McDonald, and I will …Read More

I recently attended Cisco Live in San Diego last week and wanted to share some of my impressions of the show. First of all, the weather was a disappointment. I’m a native Californian (the northern state of course) and I was looking forward to some sweet weather instead of the cool overcast climate. It’s been …Read More

Good news. The SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) will be presenting a live webinar on the topic of NFS version 4, including version 4.1 (RFC 5661) as well as a glimpse of what is being considered for version 4.2. The expert on the topic will be Alex McDonald, SNIA NFS SIG co-chair. Gary Gumanow, ESF …Read More

Experts from SNIA’s Ethernet Storage Forum are going to discuss the key drivers to consider working with NFSv4. For years, NFSv3 has been the practical standard of choice. But, times have changed and significant advances in the NFS standards are ready to address today’s challenges around massive scale, cloud deployments, performance and management. Join our …Read More

As the migration to 10Gb Ethernet moves forward, many data centers are looking to converge network and storage I/O to fully utilize a ten-fold increase in bandwidth. Industry discussions continue regarding the merits of 10GbE iSCSI and FCoE. Some of the key benefits of both protocols were presented in an iSCSI SIG webcast that included …Read More

“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 …Read More

Few weeks ago I was invited to present the state of the pNFS to the Purdue University. They are interested to be one of the early adopters and I jumped on that opportunity to promote pNFS. The presentation included the deep dive in the protocol and the need for scalability and I continued with the …Read More