NetApp Novus: Enterprise Scale-Out pNFS Metadata for Gigawatt scale AI- Steven Pruchniewski | Net App

Parallel NFS solved the data path; the metadata path is still the bottleneck. NetApp Novus builds on the pNFS flex file layout (RFC 8435) with a metadata tier — the Novus Data Director — of stateless daemons over a distributed in-memory key-value store, using flat constant-time lookups rather than directory sharding.