To setup NFS on Blob Storage, there are a few things that have to be enabled for the subscription. This approach is still valid for some use cases, but NFS allows for protocol-level access to blob storage, so any NFS client can mount Blob Storage as part of the client’s file system, including Windows, now that it has an NFS client. Before Microsoft added this feature, mounting Blob Storage as part of a file system was only possible through Blobfuse. The other implementation is for less performant, but highly scalable workloads on Azure Blob Storage. The first one is through Azure NetApp Files, a service that was built with a partnership between NetApp and Microsoft to provide file shares as a service for large data sets. On Azure, there are two primary ways to get NFS as a service. Because of its rise in popularity along with Linux, support for the protocol even among cloud vendors providing storage as a service remains a priority to help maintain backward compatibility with older applications that are being migrated to the cloud. Through this rise, it became a staple among networks that used Linux hosts for sharing files. It remained a rather obscure file-sharing system with the SMB and NCP dominating the market until Novell fell out of favor and Linux rose in popularity as a server-based operating system. Unlike SMB and NCP however, NFS went on to be released as an open standard and was widely adopted by the UNIX community on systems like BSD and Linux. There was SMB from Microsoft that shipped as part of Windows for Workgroups and Windows NT, the IPX based NCP from Novell that was hugely popular for business networks, and the NFS protocol that originated from Sun Microsystems. Even now, the concept still lives on as it evolved to cloud-based storage options that serve much of the same purpose.ĭuring the 1980s and 1990s, several different file sharing protocols emerged for networks from different vendors. The ubiquitous “file server” was a mainstay in most businesses from this time through the 2010s. When the PC industry took off in the 1980’s file share became commonplace among most businesses, both large and small. The idea of being able to access data across a wire by multiple machines was created not long after the first network was created. File shares on computer networks are as old as the concept of a network itself.

Nfs client software for windows 10