Today’s storage world would appear to have been divided into three major and mutually exclusive categories: block, file and object storage. The marketing that shapes much of the user demand would appear to suggest that these are three quite distinct animals, and many systems are sold as exclusively either SAN for block, NAS for file …Read More

How would you rate your NFS knowledge? That’s the question Alex McDonald and I asked our audience at our recent live Webcast, “What is NFS?.” From those who considered themselves to be an NFS expert to those who thought NFS was a bit of a mystery, we got some great questions. As promised, here are …Read More

Need a primer on NFS? On March 23, 2016, The Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) will present a live Webcast “What is NFS? An NFS Primer.” The popular and ubiquitous Network File System (NFS) is a standard protocol that allows applications to store and manage data on a remote computer or server. NFS provides two services; …Read More

Maybe you’ve asked yourself recently; “Hmm, I wonder what’s new in NFSv4?” Maybe (and more likely) you haven’t; but you should. During the last few years, NFSv4 has become the version of choice for many users, and there are lots of great reasons for making the transition from NFSv3 to NFSv4. Not the least of …Read More

On October 7, 2015, the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum is pleased to present its next live Webcast on OpenStack Manila. Manila is the OpenStack file share service that provides the management of file shares (for example, NFS and CIFS) as a core service to OpenStack. Intended to be an open-standards, highly-available and fault-tolerant component of …Read More

We received several great questions at our What’s New in NFS 4.2 Webcast. We did not have time to answer them all, so here is a complete Q&A from the live event. If you missed it, it’s now available on demand. Q. Are there commercial Linux or windows distributions available which have adopted pNFS? A. …Read More

We’re excited to announce our next ESF Webcast on NFSv4.2. With NFSv4.1 implemented on several commercial NFS systems, an established Linux client and a new pNFS Linux server, there is a continued growth of NFS usage in the IT industry. NFSv4.1, first introduced in 2010, meets many needs in the modern datacenter, but there are …Read More

Cloud File Services: SMB/CIFS and NFS…in the Cloud – Q&A At our recent live ESF Webcast, “Cloud File Services: SMB/CIFS and NFS…in the Cloud” we talked about evaporating your existing file server into the cloud. Over 300 people have viewed the Webcast. If you missed it, it’s now available on-demand. It was an interactive session …Read More

Imagine evaporating your existing file server into the cloud with the same experience and level of control that you currently have on-premises. On October 1st, ESF will host a live Webcast that introduces the concept of Cloud File Services and discusses the pros and cons you need to consider. There are numerous companies and startups …Read More

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 …Read More