Editing Network File System (section)

=== {{anchor|PNFS}}2000s ===
By the 21st century, neither DFS nor AFS had achieved any major commercial success as compared to SMB or NFS.  IBM, which had formerly acquired the primary commercial vendor of DFS and AFS, [[Transarc]], donated most of the AFS source code to the [[free software community]] in 2000. The [[OpenAFS]] project lives on. In early 2005, IBM announced end of sales for AFS and DFS.

In January, 2010, [[Panasas]] proposed an NFSv4.1 based on their ''Parallel NFS'' (pNFS) technology claiming to improve data-access parallelism<ref>{{Cite web |title= pNFS |publisher= [[Panasas]] |url= http://www.pnfs.com |access-date= August 4, 2013 }}</ref> capability. The NFSv4.1 protocol defines a method of separating the [[metadata#File system metadata|filesystem meta-data]] from file data location; it goes beyond the simple name/data separation by striping the data amongst a set of data servers. This differs from the traditional NFS server which holds the names of files and their data under the single umbrella of the server. Some products are multi-node NFS servers, but the participation of the client in separation of meta-data and data is limited.

The NFSv4.1 pNFS server is a set of server resources or components; these are assumed to be controlled by the meta-data server.

The pNFS client still accesses one meta-data server for traversal or interaction with the namespace; when the client moves data to and from the server it may directly interact with the set of data servers belonging to the pNFS server collection. The NFSv4.1 client can be enabled to be a direct participant in the exact location of file data and to avoid solitary interaction with one NFS server when moving data.

In addition to pNFS, NFSv4.1 provides:

* Sessions
* Directory Delegation and Notifications
* Multi-server Namespace
* [[access control list]]s and [[discretionary access control]]
* Retention Attributions
* SECINFO_NO_NAME