The benefits of utilizing distributed services to improve productivity, support flexible decision making and address corporate rightsizing objectives are widely agreed upon. From the small business to the large global corporation, the issue is no longer whether or not to implement, but which solution to choose. Selecting a suitable distributed file service is one of the most fundamental decisions affecting reliable, transparent information access across the corporation. Products vary significantly in their ability to satisfy key requirements such as scalability from small to large networks, fast and transparent access to geographically distributed file systems, information protection, ease of administration, and wide support from a variety of vendors. The right choice is one that addresses all of these areas successfully.

The NFS® distributed file system is a component of the ONC+ distributed computing solution from SunSoft. It is an enterprise solution that provides secure, high performance transparent access to information on worldwide, heterogeneous networks.

Originally released in 1985, NFS is a robust, fully featured solution that currently supports an installed base of over 8 million systems. NFS growth has been phenomenal in both workstation/server and PC environments. Particularly noteworthy is the recent steep climb in PC network environments. SunSoft's commitment to evolving NFS technology to meet the needs of the distributed file sharing community ensures the growth curve will continue rising rapidly in the future.

NFS is an open standard that implements a client/server architecture for file sharing that is supported on heterogeneous systems from PCs to mainframes. The source code is available for licensing from SunSoft and a written specification can be obtained freely via file transfer from several locations on the Internet. Over 300 organizations have licensed NFS technology and products exist on all major computer and operating system platforms

Since its first introduction, NFS has continued to evolve and has rapidly moved forward to meet the distributed file sharing requirements for the global enterprise in the 1990's and beyond. Some of the most important features provided by NFS include:

• Scalability to support small to large enterprise networks

• Continuous, transparent access to global files by virtue of a newly enhanced automatic mounting facility

• A new revision to the NFS protocol, NFS Version 3, increases scalability and performance

• Local disk caching and improved, highly competitive performance enable fast access to information

• A flexible and extensible security architecture ensures files are protected from unauthorized intruders

• Centralized administration reduces time and effort required to perform routine administration tasks

• Support for traditional, low cost diskless and dataless client systems, as well as for a new client alternative called the Solstice [2]) AutoClient

• An optional NFS implementation for Solaris SPARC platforms is tolerant of system and network failures

This document contains an overview of the features and benefits provided by the latest advances in NFS technology. Where pertinent, a description of the implementation of these features in Solaris is provided. In addition, information on new features that will be available in SunSoft's upcoming Solaris 2.5 release is included. Unless otherwise noted, all features described herein are supported on Solaris for both Intel and SPARC platforms. If you are new to NFS, please refer to Appendix A for a description of the fundamentals before reading on.

Footnote 1
See Reference Section for information on X/Open and IETF standardization of NFS

Footnote 2
Solstice is SunSoft's recently announced strategy for enterprise management.