Parallel NFS (PNFS) began in 2002 as an effort to standardize parallel file system clients into one client for all parallel file systems of all types, file, object, and block based.
Over the last two decades that effort slowly added functionality to NFS to deal with scale and today it has become an open standards-based competitor in the NAS, Scalable NAS, Distributed and Distance aware file system, and parallel file system. A short historical perspective and the high-level features that had to be added to NFS to enable scalable NFS solutions will be covered.
Finally, information on future facing efforts to add remaining featured needed to be the most complete scalable file system solution that is also standards-based, provide support the development of a community based open-source version, and enable a large community and industry ecosystem around PNFS with many proprietary and open solutions will be presented.