Know about Huawei and openEuler NFS Plus protocol

Reportedly, Huawei at the openEuler Developer Conference 2023 last month together with openEuler released the NFS [1] + protocol. It is launched with the capability to achieve single-client access to NAS [2] and improve storage reliability times.

We are living in the era of digital transformation, the value of unstructured data is rapidly increasing. A large number of files are added to the production business of industries such as finance, large enterprises, and medical care, requiring NAS storage to comprehensively improve performance and reliability, and to cope with new changes when file business enters the core of production.

The Key Innovations

• IO path software and hardware failures, second-level switching. A single NFS mount point uses multiple IPs for access, and multiple links are established between the client and the server to solve reliability issues across controllers and sites.
• Multi-link aggregation to improve concurrent access capabilities of hosts. Network card port/multi-network card/multi-node aggregation greatly improves host access performance.
• The industry’s first three-layer network active-active path automatic switching, lower-layer storage failure or host-side IO timeout, cross-site AA active active switching, to solve the problem of cross-engine failure and host unawareness.

Luo Xianqiang, senior architect of Huawei storage, said that when the host side accesses NAS storage through the traditional NFS protocol, because the host can only access the storage through one mount point, the host cannot access it when the network or link fails, and the reliability is insufficient. At the same time, the performance of a single mount point is limited by the performance of a single physical link, and there is a performance bottleneck for important services. In addition, when the host accesses the active-active NAS storage through the three-tier network, the host cannot perceive the storage failure, and the service cannot be switched automatically.