Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

The NFS filesystem was designed as a work-group filesystem, making a central file store available to and shared between a number of client workstations. However, more recently NFS has grown in popularity in the server room, connecting large application servers with back-end file servers. In this environment, where high-speed access to data is critical, high capacity interconnects like gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband are to be expected. With RDMA technology we can fully utilize the data capacity of these interconnects, while providing relief for host CPU and memory buses from the demands of managing a "fire hose" of data.Here we describe the use of RDMA as an RPC transport layer. We show that the NFS protocol running over this new transport achieves higher throughput than a conventional TCP transport along with a reduction in CPU utilization. The benefits of an RDMA transport are enjoyed not only by the applications that use NFS mounts, but extend to any RPC service that requires high speed and efficient transfer of large volumes of data.

No abstract