Transactional NTFS only works on Vista, Server 2003, and later. It only works on local drives. There are many other limitations. Because of these limitations, I have not yet been able to use Transacitonal NTFS in any real program. Somebody always wants to store all their stuff--even critical stuff--on some network share.
I mean doing things like accessing an Access database stored on a network share from multiple clients. I don't think many people are using iSCSI as a replacement for SMB yet.
I agree that the fact that it's only supported on Vista and later is a problem, but XP will hopefully slide into irrelevancy in the next year or so.
> It only works on local drives.
Are the things described in the blog post atomic over NFS? I remember reading that NFS breaks plenty of the guarantees that a POSIX system provides. Guaranteeing atomicity over a network does seem to be a somewhat harder job than guaranteeing it locally.
It could very well be Server 2008 instead of Server 2003.
A perfect NFSv4 implemenation, configured properly, provides a very useful set of guarantees. However, the quality of NFSv4 implementations has been an issue. Especially, Linux's NFSv4 server implementation has historically had many flaws. Plus, people often mount NFS using the NFSv3 protocol instead of NFSv4, and/or reduce the safety guarantees with the goal of improving performance.
This is why almost everybody recommends NOT to use NFS to store anything critical. For example, SQLite's documentation states very clearly that you shouldn't store SQLite databases on NFS. And, this is why Oracle supports NFS (a) only with a list of specific NFS server implementations (mostly NetApp), and (b) using its own built in NFS client implementation (not the operating system's transparent NFS client).
I think we're far off from calling XP irrelevant. People were still buying XP pre-installed PCs last year. I would say 2012 will be earliest mass-market software can realistically start ignoring XP.
