With ideas like thin provisioning taking shape, storage market is bumping with new ideas. And now comes pNFS - parallel NFS which enables multiple NFS servers to contribute to become a single server and share a clustered file system.
NAS though cheap has a fundamental limit in scaling and performance. Here the pNFS chips in. It can reuse your commodity servers to form a cluster out of them and can really scale linearly. It almost works like a multi path file system where a regular NFS server is replaced by a NFS4.1 Meta Data server(MDS). The MDS is moved out of band and now clients can directly talk to the array behind.
The best part is - this effort has been standardized through IETF and on its way to become a part of NFS4.1 draft. So storage vendors know which direction to drive their efforts to. As of now only Panasas provides a pNFS solution and chances are others will follow. It would be really interesting to see next few months on the market :)
Sun is likely to come up with the next implementation. For some good tutorials about pNFS, watch this space .... http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/pnfsdemos/basics
An html version of the NFS 4.1 draft is available here
http://www.nfsv4-editor.org/draft-10/draft-ietf-nfsv4-minorversion1-10.html
2 comments:
thanks for the information sharing here on this blog. I found it refreshinly crisp and insightful.
what's your two cents here:
NFS circa 1970's
PNFS 2008?
why pnfs? what's the alternative.
why not MVS?
Sorry for replying so late. I didn't notice your comment for a while. The original NFS draft is meant to work as a client-server model. One box as a server and the other as client. pNFS let you consolidate all your servers together to work as one entity and hence the performance could be better. pNFS would be better than other clustering methodologies because minimal amount of reqork would be needed. No new setups, you just need a new software that works as pNFS client or server. Alternative to pNFS are many in number. And most of those are cluster file systems like lustre, IBM GFS, linux clusters etc. I am not sure what exactly do you mean by MVS.
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