Name: draft-gibson-pnfs-problem-statement-01
Title: pNFS Problem Statement
State: Active
Authors: Garth Gibson
Group: Individual Submissions (none)
Date: 2004-07-20
This draft considers the problem of limited bandwidth to NFS servers. The
bandwidth limitation exists because an NFS server has limited network, CPU,
memory and disk I/O resources. Yet, access to any one file system through
the NFSv4 protocol requires that a single server be accessed. While NFSv4
allows file system migration, it does not provide a mechanism that supports
multiple servers simultaneously exporting a single writable file system.
This problem has become aggravated in recent years with the advent of very
cheap and easily expanded clusters of application servers that are also NFS
clients. The aggregate bandwidth demands of such clustered clients,
typically working on a shared data set preferentially stored in a single
file system, can increase much more quickly than the bandwidth of any
server. The proposed solution is to provide for the parallelization of file
services, by enhancing NFSv4 in a minor version.
[sh-index] Back to list of manuals
|
| |
