Red Hat Enterprise Linux shipped their first commercially supported parallel NFS client on February 21st. The Red Hat ecosystem can deploy pNFS with the confidence of engineering, test, and long-term support of the industry standard protocol.
Red Hat Engineering has been working with the upstream community and several SNIA ESF member companies to backport code and test interoperability with RHEL6. This release supports all IO functions in pNFS, including Direct IO. Direct IO support is required for KVM virtualization, as well as to support the leading databases. Shared workloads and Big Data have performance and capacity requirements that scale unpredictably with business needs.
Parallel NFS (pNFS) enables scaling out NFS to improve performance, manage capacity and reduce complexity. An IETF standard storage protocol, pNFS can deliver parallelized IO from a scale-out NFS array and uses out-of-band metadata services to deliver high-throughput solutions that are truly industry standard. SNIA ESF has published several papers and a webinar specifically focused on pNFS architecture and benefits. They can be found on the SNIA ESF Knowledge Center.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.