Panasas, the parallel clustered storage house, is going to open source its proprietary DirectFlow client software to accelerate the adoption of pNFS, the emerging Parallel Network File System standard, the first performance upgrade to NFS since, well, since Bill Joy 25 years ago.

NFS, the current network file system standard, doesn't support parallel I/O and existing parallel products from the key storage vendors are incompatible.

pNFS, which owes a lot of its structure to Panasas, enables direct parallel data transfer between clients and networked storage devices with no expensive filer heads.

It's supposed to solve the storage I/O bottlenecks and drive customer deployments of parallel storage solutions - parallelism being the coming bottleneck corrective according to Panasas - particularly in cluster and multi-core deployments.

See, it'll separate the data path of an NFS file system from the metadata or control path, and eliminate vendor lock-in in the process. It's also supposed to save developers from having to support multiple proprietary storage systems.

Well, anyway, since its business is based on it and since it expects to be first out with pNFS-compatible gear, Panasas has a vested interest in seeing the protocol become ubiquitous and so it's nosing it along.

Later this year, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) NFSv4 subcommittee is supposed to wrap up its work on pNFS as part of NFS 4.1.

pNFS is supposed to support Linux, Windows, AIX and Solaris. Applications can limp along without being optimized, but operating systems have to accommodate the thing.

Panasas has set up an R&D center in Tel Aviv to work on getting whatever support is necessary into the Linux kernel. Microsoft is reportedly making incoherent noises about its support. Sun and IBM as well as EMC and Network Appliance are part of the consortium developing the standard.

Panasas co-founder and CTO Garth Gibson co-authored the standard's initial problem statement three years ago. The concept for the pNFS proposal was derived from the company's DirectFlow protocol, a core component of the Panasas PanFS parallel file system, and currently provides nearly all of the functionality the standard is expected to demand.

Panasas figures the open sourced DirectFlow client software will show the industry how it's solved some the hardest problems in parallel file systems. It said an object layout driver and iSCSI drivers would be available on its web site. The contribution includes the storage access manager, OSD client, Object iSCSI and other network layers and parts of the Panasas libraries.

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