This announcement was made on April 22, 2009. I've been busy getting ready for an overseas trip, and once overseas found my hotel had a lax approach to Internet service (when one is in a hotel filled with hundreds of vacationers, beware the phrase "the hotel WiFi is free": the Tragedy of the Commons kicks in with a vengeance) so regrettably am not commenting until today.
Microsoft is partnering with the University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration to produce an NFSv4.1 client for Windows. Bob Muglia of Microsoft is quoted as:
“NFSv4.1 is an important standard for accessing parallel file
systems in the high-performance computing market, where access to vast
amounts of data is critical in areas like scientific or technical
computing systems."
Emphasis mine.
A couple quick comments.
- First, I congratulate Microsoft on expanding its presence in the NFS industry. It only makes sense that one of the largest software companies in the world step up its investments in the only open standard file access protocol (joining other software giants like IBM and Oracle).
- Second, I've pointed out before, NFSv4.1 and NFS should not be pigeon holed into narrow markets. Anything that works well with NFSv3 and NFSv4.0 will work well with NFSv4.1. Anything that works well with NFS will work well with pNFS. Business applications like Oracle database today run well over NFS, and I expect they will run even better over pNFS.
Just as CITI has been obliged to do with its Linux NFSv4.0 and NFSv4.1 client efforts, I hope that the code it produces for Windows is as equally adept at supporting all classes of workloads and applications.
Here is something that should be possible with NFSv4.1 and I suspect is on many storage consumer's wish list: Microsoft Exchange support over NFS. That would be really stepping it up!
