"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."
