Purity//FA 6.4.10 provides a big boost to Pure’s unified block and file experience by now officially supporting NFS 4.1—something many of our customers have patiently been waiting for.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, we’ve written a haiku:
NFS four one,
The protocol that gives you
Data center bliss.
If that didn’t get you excited about NFS 4.1 being generally supported on FlashArray™, maybe highlights of its capabilities will help:
- NFS 4.1 consolidates all communications to a single port via compound operations, enabling easier traversal of firewalls and other security measures that may exist in the data center. It’s also now exclusively TCP-based; UDP is not needed.
- An improved file locking mechanism eliminates the need to manually clear orphaned locks that existed in NFS 3.0—a big challenge for storage admins in complicated file read/write environments. Because NFS 4.1 is a stateful protocol, all state information is stored on both the client and the server when they’re active and recovered mutually in the event of an outage.
- Unified ACLs based on the Windows model provide better interoperability with Windows and CIFS for storage administrators. NFSv4 ACLs are made up of an array of access control entries (ACEs), which contain information regarding access allowed/denied, permission bits, user name/group name, and flags. While this ACL usage is new, it’s not required for NFS 4.1 to work.
An important thing to note: Kerberos authentication and pNFS functionality are not supported in this release but are on the roadmap.
One more thing…Purity//FA 6.4.10 now supports NFS 4.1 for VMware datastores. VMware is one of the most popular use cases for FlashArray, so enabling support for the next generation of networked file system access is a natural evolution. We announced a lot of great VMware NFS-based support back with our larger Unified Block and File announcement back in April. Check out all the goodness Pure Storage has released to enable VMware admins to make their management tasks easier to accomplish.
NFS 4.1 support—now shipping with Purity//FA 6.4.10.
