Huawei Joins Hands with OpenEuler to Release NFS+Protocol

Recently, at the OpenEuler Developer Conference 2023 held in Shanghai, Huawei collaborated with OpenEuler to release the NFS [1]+protocol, achieving a 3-fold increase in single client access NAS [2] storage reliability and a 6-fold increase in performance, helping NAS storage fully meet the high standard requirements of new production core scenarios.
In the era of digital transformation, the value of unstructured data continues to increase. The production business of industries such as finance, large enterprises, and healthcare has added a large number of files, requiring NAS storage to comprehensively improve performance and reliability, in response to new changes in the entry of file business into the production core.

Huawei Storage Senior Architect Luo Xianqiang stated that when the host accesses NAS storage through the traditional NFS protocol, the reliability is insufficient due to the fact that the host can only access storage through one mount point and cannot access it during network or link failures. At the same time, the performance of a single mount point is limited by the performance of a single physical link, and there are performance bottlenecks in important services. In addition, when the host accesses dual active NAS storage through a three-layer network, the host is unable to perceive storage failures and the business cannot automatically switch.
Faced with the key challenges mentioned above, Huawei collaborated with OpenEuler to launch a new NFS+protocol. It is built-in to the OpenEuler operating system and does not modify the operating system data plane. It does not occupy host CPU resources and only adds path functions on the control plane. Through three major innovations, it achieves cross control, cross device, and cross site fault second level automatic switching, improving NAS storage access performance by six times and reliability by three times.
Innovation 1: IO path software and hardware failure, second level switching. A single NFS mount point uses multiple IPs for access, and multiple links are established between the client and server to solve reliability issues across controllers and sites.
Innovation 2: Multi link aggregation to improve the concurrent access capability of hosts. Network card ports/multiple network cards/multi node aggregation, significantly improving host access performance.
Innovation 3: The industry’s first three-layer network with dual active path automatic switching, lower level storage failure or host side IO timeout, cross site AA dual active active switching, solving problems of cross engine failure and host insensitivity.
Faced with new scenarios, new businesses, and new demands, enterprises need to respond promptly to rapidly changing user needs in order to stay ahead in fierce competition. Huawei works with openEuler to jointly build a NAS ecosystem, create an NFS+protocol that multiplies performance and reliability, help improve the overall performance and reliability of NAS storage, provide customers with highly reliable, high-performance, easy to operate and maintain NAS storage solutions, and accelerate Digital transformation.