In recent years the growth of the amount of information collected and stored within enterprises, scientific laboratories, and the Internet as a whole, has fueled the need for high-performance network storage.

With increasing network transfer rates, network file system performance is often limited by end-system overhead, caused primarily by memory copying and network protocol processing. In this talk, I will evaluate alternative strategies for reducing overhead in such systems, focusing on optimizations to remote procedure call (RPC)-based data transfer using either remote direct memory access (RDMA) or network interface support for pre-posting of application receive buffers.

I will also argue that RDMA network interface system are sufficient for storage applications. Such an interface can reinstate the multiprogramming principles that are violated in early commercial RDMA systems.