pNFS in the News Again

I need to set the record about a claim made in a recent headline:

http://storage.blogs.techtarget.com/2008/08/15/netapp-expert-says-pnfs-not-necessarily-vmware-solution/ says:

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.