PowerScale OneFS 9.8.0.0 Web Administration Guide

RDMA support for NFSoRDMA

The Network File System over Remote Direct Memory Access (NFSoRDMA) feature lets you perform memory-to-memory transfer of data over high-speed networks. Starting OneFS 9.8.0.0 release NFSv4 support has been added, earlier only NFSv3 was supported.

Network adapters that have RDMA support (known as RNICs) are used to transfer data directly, while using minimal amount of CPU, resulting in increased throughput. For applications that access large datasets on remote NFS, this feature enables:

• Increased single-stream throughput to leverage the full throughput of high-speed networks where the network interface controllers coordinate the transfer of large amounts of data at line speed.
• Low latency to provide fast responses to network requests, and, as a result, makes remote file storage feel as if it is directly attached storage.
• Low CPU utilization to use fewer CPU cycles when transferring data over the network, which leaves more power available to other applications running on the client.

The NFSoRDMA feature adds another front-end network transport communication mechanism between the client and OneFS node. The front-end network transport communication provides remote data transfer directly to and from memory without CPU intervention. This feature improves CPU utilization on the client machine and improve read or write throughput.

The NFSv4 over RDMA feature requires that clients have RDMA drivers and appropriate NFSv4 over RDMA clients on their system to be compatible.

The NFSoRDMA is supported for only NFSv3/NFSv4 and not supported for VLAN and Aggregated interfaces.

For more information about NFP versions, see the release notes.