Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Red Hat Releases RHEL 6.2 with pNFS support

Hat Tip to Trond Mylkelbust, the Official NFS Client maintainer for Linux.

Today the NFS Industry received an early Christmas present from Red Hat.

Today Red Hat announced the availability of RHEL 6.2.

The RHEL 6.2 Features list from RedHat explicitly mentions pNFS (for the files layout only) as supported in RHEL 6.2.

This pNFS client capability complements NetApp's release last month of its Data ONTAP pNFS server.

Note that the Linux community has achieved a first here: this is the first time a Linux vendor of an enterprise-class distribution beat all other commericial operating systems to market with an NFS client. Historically, Linux was way behind commercial operating systems in delivering NFSv3 and NFSv4.0 (by 5 to 10 years). Note that this was acheived slightly less than 3 years after the NFSv4.1 and pNFS standards were ratified, and less than two years after those standards were published as RFC5661.

I want to extend my congratulations and thanks to Trond, Red Hat, the NetApp Linux NFS client engineering team, and Linux development community for the hard work of the past several years that went into this milestone.