"NFS was originally designed to solve the problem of remote access to home directories and supporting diskless workstations and servers over local area networks. With the advent of cheaper high-performance computing in the form of Linux compute clusters, multi-core processors and blades, the demands for higher performance file access have risen sharply. It's no wonder that a protocol designed for 1984 speeds would be unable to cope....
"pNFS is a key feature of NFS 4.1. The p in pNFS stands for parallel, and pNFS will provide parallel I/O to file systems accessible over NFS. It enables the storage administrator to do things like stripe a single file across multiple NFS servers."
