Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > Dell PowerScale OneFS and Perforce Helix Core > NFS over RDMA
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a protocol that enables clients to transfer data from the memory of a server directly into the memory of a client. RDMA allows the client to avoid using the TCP stack and incurring the usual associated performance penalties. Importantly, using RDMA reduces CPU utilization on both the client and server.
OneFS 9.2 or later is required to serve NFS traffic over RDMA. NFS over RDMA is enabled in the global UNIX sharing settings.
The OneFS hardware must have Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro, ConnectX-4, or ConnectX-5 front-end NICs. To determine the NIC type, run the following command from the OneFS command line:
isi network interfaces list -v
The interfaces that support RDMA display SUPPORTS_RDMA_RRoCE in the Flags section.
The client systems must be running a Linux distribution with NIC hardware and drivers that support NFS over RDMA, such as Mellanox ConnectX-3 (and higher) or ATTO FastFrame3 NICs. For details about mounting a OneFS file system using RDMA, see How to Configure NFS over RDMA.
For considerations when preparing an environment for NFS over RDMA traffic, see the Dell PowerScale OneFS Best Practices white paper.