Enhancing the Performance of NFSv4 With RDMA

NFS is a widely deployed storage technology. It has gone through several revisions. One of the latest revisions, v4 has started to become deployed. NFSv4 on OpenSolaris uses TCP as the underlying transport. This has limited its performance. In this paper, the authors take on the challenge of designing an RDMA transport for NFSv4. Challenges include COMPOUND procedures, which might potentially have unbounded request and reply sizes. Performance evaluation shows that NFSv4 can achieve an IOzone Read throughput of over 700 MB/s and an IOzone Write bandwidth of over 500 MB/s. It also significantly outperforms NFSv4/TCP.