Virtualizing Network File Systems (thesis)

Abstract:

Over the years, centralized file server appliances based on standard protocols such as NFS and CIFS have been adopted as the de facto standard for file service. The scalability limitations of centralized file servers have led large organizations to deploy numerous independent appliances to meet huge increases in their storage demand caused by phenomenal data growth and more stringent regulatory compliance requirements. Unfortunately, this stop-gap approach brings administrators into another management quagmire: forcing them to manage numerous independent storage islands and fight bottlenecks and load imbalances at a high cost. In addition, this approach often causes significant outage in file service as well as other business critical services that depend upon file service, resulting in loss of revenue as well as direct and significant
customer impact.