mNFS: Multicast-based NFS cluster

Abstract

NFS is a distributed file system which is widely used in UNIX environments. Many studies have been worked to improve its I/O performance and scalability. However, existing architectures, which have either single load balancer or meta server, could suffer from single-point-of-failure and unnecessary network delay. We propose a new NFS architecture called mNFS cluster to improve its scalability. Experimental results show that mNFS outperforms both Linux NFS and NFSp by 64% and 99%, respectively.