... has reached a significant open milestone today. The Solaris parallel NFS prototype has been posted on the OpenSolaris pNFS project page. Sun and a number of our IETF friends are busy finishing up the pNFS standard which uses a metadata and data server architecture much like a number of proprietary shared file systems available today -- Luster, Panasas, and others. Here's a picture I borrowed:

What sets the pNFS effort apart is the marriage of open standards and open source. The pNFS standards and interoperability efforts are benefiting from the Linux pNFS work at the University of Michigan as well as the OpenSolaris community pNFS effort. Just a week or so ago, pNFS vendors got together in Austinfor a Bakeoff to do interoperability testing. The open standards and open source collaboration are really starting to bear fruit... (that's all that we're allowed to say :^)

 Want to know more about pNFS and how it might fit in your environment? Check out Robin Harris' blog for a great overview.