Summary: Network File System (NFS) has been around since 1984, but it continues to evolve and provide the basis for distributed file systems. Today, NFS (through the pNFS extension) provides scalable access to files distributed across a network. Explore the ideas behind distributed file systems and in particular, recent advances in NFS. A network file system is a network abstraction over a file system that allows a remote client to access it over a network in a similar way to a local file system. Although not the first such system, NFS has grown and evolved into the most powerful and widely used network file system in UNIX®. NFS permits sharing of a common file system among a multitude of users and provides the benefit of centralizing data to minimize needed storage.
This article begins with a short history of NFS, its origins, and how it has evolved. It then explores the NFS architecture and where NFS is going.
A short history of NFS
The first network file system—called File Access Listener—was developed in 1976 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). An implementation of the Data Access Protocol (DAP), it was part of the DECnet suite of protocols. Like TCP/IP, DEC published protocol specifications for its networking protocols, which included the DAP.
NFS was the first modern network file system (built over the IP protocol). It began as an experimental file system developed in-house at Sun Microsystems in the early 1980s. Given the popularity of the approach, the NFS protocol was documented as a Request for Comments (RFC) specification and evolved into what is known as NFSv2. As a standard, NFS grew quickly because of its ability to interoperate with other clients and servers.
The standard continued to evolve into NFSv3, defined by RFC 1813. This iteration of the protocol was much more scalable than previous versions, supporting large files (larger than 2GB), asynchronous writes, and TCP as the transport protocol, paving the way for file systems over wide area networks. In 2000, RFC 3010 (revised by RFC 3530) brought NFS into the enterprise setting. Sun introduced NFSv4 with strong security along with a stateful protocol (prior versions of NFS were stateless). Today, NFS exists as version 4.1 (as defined by RFC 5661), which adds protocol support for parallel access across distributed servers (called the pNFS extension).
Read more: IBM
This article begins with a short history of NFS, its origins, and how it has evolved. It then explores the NFS architecture and where NFS is going.
A short history of NFS
The first network file system—called File Access Listener—was developed in 1976 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). An implementation of the Data Access Protocol (DAP), it was part of the DECnet suite of protocols. Like TCP/IP, DEC published protocol specifications for its networking protocols, which included the DAP.
NFS was the first modern network file system (built over the IP protocol). It began as an experimental file system developed in-house at Sun Microsystems in the early 1980s. Given the popularity of the approach, the NFS protocol was documented as a Request for Comments (RFC) specification and evolved into what is known as NFSv2. As a standard, NFS grew quickly because of its ability to interoperate with other clients and servers.
The standard continued to evolve into NFSv3, defined by RFC 1813. This iteration of the protocol was much more scalable than previous versions, supporting large files (larger than 2GB), asynchronous writes, and TCP as the transport protocol, paving the way for file systems over wide area networks. In 2000, RFC 3010 (revised by RFC 3530) brought NFS into the enterprise setting. Sun introduced NFSv4 with strong security along with a stateful protocol (prior versions of NFS were stateless). Today, NFS exists as version 4.1 (as defined by RFC 5661), which adds protocol support for parallel access across distributed servers (called the pNFS extension).
Read more: IBM
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