The latest edition of AFS coincided with the release of AOS 5.6, many new features and updates in AOS meant AFS was somewhat overlooked. So here’s what’s new :
NFS
Until now it’s been SMB or nothing but that’s now changed, NFSv3 and v4 support. The file server VMs are also capable of serving both file systems so there’s no need to deploy individual AFS clusters per file system preference.
Change File Tracking (CFT)
Change File Tracking is long overdue when it comes to being able to back up the file data. An API is now available for backup vendors to use and Nutanix will be working closely with the vendor ecosystem on this.
Active / Active configuration
For customers that wish to deploy their file services across 2 locations and synchronously keep them up-to-date. There is a small caveat to how this gets deployed in that it will require the use of Peer Software’s, PeerLink. This, in essence, provides load balancing and manages the direction the updates need to go.
File Auditing
A new API has been exposed to allow the actions of file access to be exported to a syslog server for audit purposes. Expect to see some developments in the Partner eco-system to provide rich analysis and reporting.
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