Not sure how it would ever be technically possible for a networked filesystem to get even near directly attached storage.
But, for sure, the typical carrier grade EMC or Netapp is MUCH slower then a good SAN. I'm talking about petabytes of very small (average maybe 20kB) files with lots of _random_ sync writes and reads. NFS has a lot of other benefits, but it surely is not super high performance in every usecase. Regardless of what a theoretical marketing whitepaper has shown in some lab setup.
Someone who thinks that you can put a network protocol around a filesystem without _any_ performance impact is nuts.
BUT if your usecase fits NFS you might as well get very good performance out of it. As always, pick the right technology for your specific case.
Well, what would it help in terms of NFS? You'd still have to tell NFS to read 20kB. If it's 20kB from one big file or one 20kB file doesn't matter much. it's common to have one file per email and the usual filesystem has no problem with that.
Not sure how it would ever be technically possible for a networked filesystem to get even near directly attached storage. But, for sure, the typical carrier grade EMC or Netapp is MUCH slower then a good SAN. I'm talking about petabytes of very small (average maybe 20kB) files with lots of _random_ sync writes and reads. NFS has a lot of other benefits, but it surely is not super high performance in every usecase. Regardless of what a theoretical marketing whitepaper has shown in some lab setup.
Someone who thinks that you can put a network protocol around a filesystem without _any_ performance impact is nuts.
BUT if your usecase fits NFS you might as well get very good performance out of it. As always, pick the right technology for your specific case.