Microsoft has forged a offer having a University of Michigan research unit to create an open-source edition of the NFS (Network File System) edition four protocol that will perform with Windows.Microsoft already provides NFS assistance in Windows client and server, but for Edition 3 only.“NFS v3 is the only version anyone reallly is shipping commercially,” said Gene Chellis, Group Program Manager for File Server with Microsoft;s Storage Solutions Division. “We don;t have announced plans on (NFS) v4. It;s on our list of things to look at.”For customers in the high-performance-computing space, however, being able to access the data that lives on Unix and Linux NFS servers is critical, Chellis acknowleded. In the same way that Microsoft is emphasizing interoperability between directories and authentication platforms,
Windows 7 32bit, so too, is it planning to provide it in the file/data-access space,
Buy Office 2007, Chellis said.“If you have data on NFS servers,
Office Pro 2010 Key, you won;t have to limit the kind of server you can use,
Microsoft Office Professional Plus,” he said. The NFS four interop means Windows servers won;t be excluded from consideration, he added.(Chellis cautioned that Microsoft;s move here should not be interpreted as Microsoft dropping SMB file-sharing in favor of NFS. That is not the case, he said.)The University of Michigan;s Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) investigation unit is the same group building an NFS v4 consumer for Linux. Edition four of NFS adds several new capabilities, including support for file locking and the mount protocol, strong security,
Microsoft Office 2010, compound operations, client caching and internationalization, according to the CITI Web site.Microsoft is providing the funding for the NFS v 4 Windows port. CITI “owns the schedule, development and release,” Chellis said. “Our customers can get it from them when it;s done,” he said.That said, Microsoft is not providing a public timetable for the NFS v4 Windows port. The Redmondians also are not committing to a specific edition of Windows client and/or server into which NFS v4 support will be built-in. (The next logical ones would be Windows 8/Windows 8 Server, I;d think, as
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 include NFS v3 assistance.)