Data Platform
pNFS is coming to a computer near you

pNFS is coming to a computer near you

by Gus Bjorklund
Posted on March 17, 2010 0 Comments

In fact, it may /already/ be on your computer.

We have an enormous variety of choices for stable storage devices for our databases and ways of configuring and accessing them. And lots of cryptic abbreviations and acronyms: JBOD, RAID 10, RAID 5, SSD, iSCSI, NFS, SCSI, ATA, NAS, SATA, SAS, AFS, SMB, and SAN to name just a few.

A new one you may not know about is pNFS or Parallel NFS. Since its original development in 1984 by Sun Microsystems, NFS has been steadily improving and growing in capabilities too. It is now almost everywhere. In January 2010, the IETF approved RFC 5661 which is the spec for NFS 4.1. RFC 5661 adds (along with a few other things) parallelization to NFS 4.0.

pNFS has been under development for a few years (since 2004) and will be well supported by storage vendors and operating systems. It will greatly increase performance and scalability of storage systems accessed via NFS.

Note: i have not had a chance to try pNFS out yet, so I can't provide you with any data about the performance of the OpenEdge RDBMS on it or how it compares with other choices.

If you want to learn more about pNFS, here are some places you can go for good summaries:

Panasas pNFS page: http://www.pnfs.com/

An IBM Developerworks pNFS article: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-pnfs/

If you want /all/ the gory details, you can find them in the IETF's RFC 5661: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5661

Gus Bjorklund

View all posts from Gus Bjorklund on the Progress blog. Connect with us about all things application development and deployment, data integration and digital business.

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