Developing NFS

The NFS protocol continues to evolve and develop with strong support from the industry. One example of this is the continuing effort that was started with NFSv4^[26] file delegation to remove the NFS server performance bottleneck by distributing file I/O operations to NFS clients. With NFSv4, delegation of the applications running on an NFS client can lock different byte-range portions of the file without creating any additional network traffic to the NAS server. This has led to a development effort called NFS Extensions for Parallel Storage. The goal of this effort is to build a highly available filesystem with no single point of failure by allowing NFS clients to share file state information and file data without requiring communication with a single NAS device for each filesystem operation.

For more information about the NFS Extensions for Parallel Storage, see http://www.citi.umich.edu/NEPS.

^[26]NFSv4 (see RFC 3530) will provide a much better security model and allow for better interoperability with CIFS. NFSv4 will also provide better handling of client crashes and robust request ordering semantics as well as a facility for mandatory file locking.