More than 350 people have already seen our SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF) webcast “Clustered File Systems: No Limits.” Our presenters, James Coomer and Jerry Lotto, did a great job explaining what clustered file systems are, key considerations, choices and performance. As we expected, there were plenty of questions, so as promised, here are answers …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

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

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

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 …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

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