pNFS in the News Again
I need to set the record about a claim made in a recent headline:
NetApp expert says pNFS not necessarily VMware solution
Excerpted content of story, which comes from words I wrote on this blog:
Certainly all hypervisor vendors should have a pNFS client on their roadmap: it would be a neat way to automatically parallelize the I/O (and metadata) of the file systems of legacy guest operating systems that don’t have pNFS (e.g. Windows 2003 guest operating systems use NTFS, which a hypervisor can virtualize today into LUNs or files on a storage server. With pNFS on the hypervisor, the files, directories, block maps, etc. of NTFS would be automatically distributed and striped).
However NIC bonding is a solution to problems that don’t exactly intersect the problems pNFS solves. Going down a pNFS-only route in lieu of NIC bonding would lead to cases where single gigabit Ethernet bandwidth between the hypervisor’s pNFS client and a storage device is still not enough.
Note that "pNFS not necessarily VMware solution" is the opposite of "Certainly all hypervisor vendors should have a pNFS client on their roadmap".
A correct headline (or at least a headline that represents the opinion I expressed) would be:
NetApp expert says pNFS not necessarily VMware solution for network bandwidth aggregation.

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