pNFS: Imagining the future and delivering on it.
Lots of buzz about the first pNFS Open Solaris code drop. For storage people the things that strike me are:
Unlimited Horizontal Scale: pNFS delivers a global namespace for file systems - think of the problem with NetApp, when you fill up one NetApp box, you get another, etc. and then you have to deal with remembering which files are on which box. With pNFS you get one file namespace, regardless of the number of servers.
It achieves this via an industry standard protocol (that's what the NFS v4.1 spec is defining, the over-the-wire protocol used between the clients needing to access a file, and the server that stores that file). This means that vendors can now start delivering interoperable, horizontally scalable solutions. In all other "clustered" file system solutions today, the implementation is proprietary – you have to get all the parts of the solution from one vendor.
The next interesting part is that we are making this available via open source, in order to continue to propagate the standard to ensure customers get high quality, interoperable, next gen solutions for file.
Bottom line: true seamless horizontal scale across multiple NAS boxes or file servers. A desktop application will no longer have to remember which NAS or server is storing their file ... imagine that!
Posted at 06:10PM Jul 16, 2007 by Nigel Dessau in Sun Storage | Comments[2]