Nfs4.1 The global filesystem approach

William Andros Adamson
Member of the Center for Information and Technology Integration (CITI) of the University of Michigan.

Within the last few years a variety of filesystems
have be been designed and deployed, adressing
well known problems of the past, like, global namespace,
security, parallelism and sufficient thoughput
for high demanding single stream applications as
well as chaotic access pattern for a huge amount
of processes under the contraint of managing several
hundreds of terabytes. Though all of those approaches have been
more or less successful they never became a standard,
one of the most charming properties of the former nfs
versions.
Andy and his group are one of the driving forces behind
the standardization process of the nfs4.1 extention.
He will report on this extention with respect to its
ability to adapt various access methods, like block and object based,
as well as on the short and medium plans for deploying
the extended protocol clients in the most popular operating
systems as well as pushing major filer vendors to become
complient to those protocols.