INTRODUCTION TO NFS                                                                                                 Back To Home

NFS in a nutshell

• NFS is a type of distributed File System (DFS)
• It allows transparent access to files, i.e. files on remote hosts can be accessed as though they are local
• It possess a client-server architecture composed by a mixture of kernel functionality on the client side and an NFS server on the server side.

A Brief History of time

• Announced in 1984 by Sun Microsystems
• Emerged from the Ethernet-TCP/IP-UNIX environment of the 1980's
• Growth - from about 3 million nodes in 1991 to 8.8 million nodes in 1994

NFS DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE

Some of the most important design principles are summarised below:

Transparent Access: Users and applications can access remote files as if they were local.

Statelessness: NFS Version 3 operates in a stateless manner using remote procedure calls (RPC) built on top of an external data representation (XDR) protocol.

Portability: NFS is machine and operating system independent. This allows it to be ported easily to multiple OS and hardware platforms from PCs to mainframes.

Fast Recovery From Failure: NFS is designed to recover quickly from system failures and network problems, causing minimal disruption of service to users.

Network Protocol Independence: NFS has the flexibility to run on multiple transport protocols instead of being restricted to just one.

Performance: NFS is designed for high performance so that users can access remote files as quickly as they can access local files.

Security: The NFS architecture enables the utilization of multiple security mechanisms and can therefore utilize new security mechanisms in the future.

Source: http://www.eecs.lehigh.edu/~zhz3/CSC350/NFS/nfs.html