| NFSv4 In-Depth | Spencer Shepler, Sun Microsystems |
| Managing Security Issues within SecureNFS on HP-UX | Tom McNeal, Hewlett Packard |
| The implementation of SecureNFS on HP-UX and Solaris involves usage of many security features and packages, including the General Security Service API, and both the Diffie-Hellman and Kerberos Security packages. These features, plus the implementation and testing of their usage within the SecureNFS framework, will be discussed and reviewed. | |
| Managing NFS with Autofs | Brent Callaghan, Sun Microsystems |
| Many NFS customers use the automounter to access all their NFS data. Many users are not even aware that their home directory is automatically mounted when they log in or have any knowledge of a superuser password and the syntax of a mount command. Yet administrators are largely ignorant of the finer points of automounter administration and make superficial use of its features. Why is that? Should we care? This tutorial will highlight many of the automounter's features, and attempt to relate what we have learned about its use over the years. | |
| Database Performance on NAS: A Tutorial | Darrell Suggs, Network Appliance |
|
IT departments are increasingly utilizing Network Attached
Storage (NAS) and the Network File System (NFS) to meet the
storage needs of mission-critical relational databases. Reasons
for this adoption include improved storage virtualization, ease
of storage deployment, decreased complexity, and decreased total
cost of ownership.
This talk will directly examine the performance of databases with NAS and provide best practice guidelines for ensuring optimal deployments. We will review the benefits of Database on NAS deployments, provide specific configuration recommendations and provide example results using a popular database application and commercial Unix operating system. | |
| Deploying Secure NFS | Nico Williams, Sun Microsystems |
| Many users of NFS do not make use of its authentication and transport security features. This talk describes what Secure NFS is and how to deploy it, including how to deploy the relevant authentication infrastructures, specifically Kerberos V. The target audience for this talk are users who have hitherto been unaware of Secure NFS or who have found the transition to Secure NFS to be too daunting. | |
| NFS/RDMA Standards and Implementation Update | Thomas Talpey, Network Appliance |
| The NFS/RDMA (NFS on Remote Direct Memory Access) standards activity has continued to progress over the past year, and some important evolutionary changes have taken place. This talk focuses on the total NFS/RDMA proposals, with an eye toward their overall architecture and component technologies. It gives a brief update of the changes since last year's Roadmap, and outlines current and next steps for the Linux implementation, with recent performance results. | |
| UFS and NFS Solaris Performance Cookbook | Roch Bourbonnais, Sun Microsystems |
|
Tuning Tips for I/O Intensive Applications.
This Presentation will go through a set of most common tuning
tips for a high performance Solaris NFS server over UFS.
The tuning recommendations are organised into Recipes. For each one we try to identify a Tell Tale Sign to alert administrators that in this situation the given recipe has potential benefit. We then describe the Fix (changing kernel parameters or mount option etc) highlighting the potential Drawbacks of this recommendation as well as the additional Memory Requirements associated. As with most tuning recommendations; None of the tips should be applied blindly. Consider your workload and measure your performance. | |
| NFS: The Need for Speed | Robert Wong, Hummingbird Keynote Speaker |
| Voice of the Customer | Tim Graves, Sun Microsystems |
| Tim will be presenting on some of the information gathered during a recent voice of the customer exercise and sharing some of the insights gained. | |
| Evolving File Model | Gordon Waidhofer, Traakan |
| The file model was so simple ten years ago: a bucket if bits and a handful of simple attributes. The modern file model is more complicated and there are problematic differences between various systems. The stage is being set for potentially unrestrained and divergent changes. What will the file model ten years from now look like? This talk reviews emerging file features, contemplates future evolution, and concludes with a discussion about fostering industry consistency. | |
| File System Benchmarking Suite | John Corbin, EP Network Storage Performance Lab |
| The talk presents a new suite of file system benchmarks that support both component and system level benchmarking. The presentation will provide an update to last years presentation on NFS client benchmarking. Examples will be presented of using the benchmark to measure file system and NFS client performance. The release plans for the benchmark will be presented. | |
| Back to the Future: NAS as the "Flux Capacitor" of Data Management | Brian Wong, Sun Microsystems Keynote Speaker |
| Computer architectures seem to operate on a "steady state" theory - things go in and out of style as the underlying technology changes. Network attached storage - in the form of Netware, SMB and NFS - was born in the networking of the early 80s, but largely fell out of vogue in the 90s. Now, another ten years on, we are faced with ever increasing complexity in data, along with the usual advances in hardware and software. In this environment, NAS has been returning to vogue. But it's more than fashion: developments in NAS seem poised to substantially change the way data is accessed and especially managed. | |
| Parallel NFS (pNFS) extensions to NFSv4 | Brent Welch, Panasas |
| pNFS is a protocol extension that provides direct, parallel I/O capabilities to NFSv4. Direct I/O means that pNFS clients can access storage devices directly, bypassing the NFS server during Read and Write operations. Parallel I/O means that a single file can be distributed over several storage devices so that a client can access a file using concurrent I/O operations. Direct I/O bypasses the NFS server so that it can support more clients. Parallel I/O means that clients can get more bandwidth to a file than a single storage device can deliver. Parallel I/O also allows large numbers of clients in compute clusters to access many storage devices at once. The pNFS extension allows for different storage protocols between clients and the storage devices. These include traditional block storage devices accessed on a SAN, object storage devices accessed via iSCSI, and file servers accessed via NFS. This inclusive approach supports a goal of having a single NFS client that is interoperable with a wide variety of high performance file system implementations. | |
| The Parallel NFSv4 Bugaboo | Andy Adamson, CITI |
|
Statelessness allowed NFS Versions 2 and 3 servers to export
shared storage in parallel with ease and opened the door to
parallel, high-bandwidth, industry standard NAS that scales in
fine-grained increments.
NFSv4 servers don't have it so easy. They have their own state to manage -- like OPEN -- but the protocol does not support distributing it among multiple servers, making it difficult to export shared storage in parallel. Yet the aggregate bandwidth demands of modern clustered clients surpase even the bandwidth availiable with these multiple parallel NFS service systems; as long as access to a single file system through the NFS protocol requires access to a single NFS server, bandwidth will be limited to the single NFS servers resources. Fortunately, NFSv4 is extensible. Efforts are under way to understand the common use cases for parallel access, to shape appropriate minor version extensions that overcome the single NFS server hardship, to prototype, to measure, and to engineer these solutions. In this talk, I will describe partnerships under way at CITI to solve the parallel NFS bugaboo. | |
| Distributed Hierarchical Storage | John Hayden, EMC |
| Distributed Hierarchal Storage Management allows customers to create filesystems on multiple tiers of storage and automatically move file resources from more expensive to less expensive storage resources based on user defined policies. These policies demote resources to more cost effective storage based on access patterns or other business process logic. Whatever the policy, the net impact to the customer is the same - better, more cost effective, storage utilization without an impact on the typical user experience. Traditional NAS DHSM solutions have not been transparent to the end user, however new developments now allow fully transparent, multi-protocol DHSM for NAS Environments. | |
| NFS in Sun Cluster | Ashutosh Tripathi, Sun Microsystems |
| We discuss the integration issues surrounding NFS and Clustering, in particular, how the Sun Cluster product helps customers protect their key NFS infrastructure from hardware and software failures. We look at the speed of NFS failover in a clustering environment, as well examine issues peculiar to clustering, such as client-side fencing, security identity failover, and file range-lock failover. Finally, we address the question of scalable (or parallel) NFS in the context of distributed filesystems available on clustering platforms such as Sun Cluster. | |
| NFS: What's Next | David Black, EMC Keynote Speaker |
| NFS is an important storage infrastructure component that continues to grow well beyond the scale of a single box serving up files. This scaling creates demands in multiple dimensions, including performance, capacity, and manageability and requires new developments in NFS. This talk will describe the scaling challenges facing NFS and advanced technology that EMC is creating to meet these challenges. | |
| NFSv4 Delegation: Past, Present, Future | Bill Baker, Sun Microsystems |
| NFSv4 introduced the concept of delegation, a technique by which the server may delegate certain responsibilities of file management to the client. This presentation will review the delegation related aspects of the protocol, illustrate the performance gains and discuss the future evolution of the delegation concept. | |
| Application Model Based Filesystem Performance Measurement | Richard McDougall, Sun Microsystems |
| "My file system can do 1000 I/Os per second, but what does that mean?" This and related questions are often at the top of the list for system administrators, system architects and developers. This talk shares filesystem measurement methodologies which connect real application behaviour with file system performance. Using a series of application models, we are able to accurately report the performance of databases, webservers, file servers and other applications on a target file systems. | |
| CIFS to the UNIX Desktop (or the Death of NFS) | Jeremy Allison, Samba/Hewlett Packard |
| Most network admins only want to support one protocol to the desktop. They have to support CIFS, so why make them add NFS ? This talk will explore how the Samba server program and Linux CIFS client will work together to provide a full-features UNIX-to-UNIX remote filesystem to compete with NFS to the desktop. | |
| NFS - An Enterprise Storage Foundation | Brian Pawlowski, Network Appliance Keynote Speaker |
| Describes recent progress and applications of NFS as a general purpose storage architecture. Highlights competitive architectures. Describes near term and long term directions for NFS and NAS architectures in general, and the underlying market and technology drivers for NFS. | |
| Autofs NG - The Next Linux Automounter | Mike Waychison, Sun Microsystems |
| System administration of even small networks requires that the network filesystems be centrally administered. Autofs is a technology available on most flavours of UNIX that many administrators consider vital to network operation. Unfortunately, the current Linux automounter is not yet feature complete, which impedes multi-OS network setups. This talk will cover the work we are doing to create a new feature-complete automounting framework on Linux and our progress thus far. | |