NFS acceleration improves performance in high-latency environments by prefetching data and temporarily storing it on the client-side SteelHead. This stored data is then used to quickly respond to client requests, reducing perceived delay. Starting with RiOS version 9.16.0, NFS optimization supports both IPv6 and IPv4. Earlier versions support only IPv4.

On the server-side SteelHead, NFS settings remain inactive until the appliance connects to an NFS server. Once connected, it receives the NFS configuration from the client-side appliance for that specific connection.

NFS settings are applied globally to all NFS servers and volumes by default. However, you can set overrides for individual servers or volumes as needed. If you configure a server-specific override, it applies to all volumes on that server—unless you also configure volume-specific settings.

NFS acceleration does not support out-of-path deployments. Additionally, latency optimization is not available for NFS versions 2 and 4. However, features like bandwidth optimization, Scalable Data Referencing (SDR), and Lempel-Ziv (LZ) compression are still supported.