Some storage appliances have special hardware to accelerate NFS operations. Those may be able to come close to the same performance as a block storage device.

Some storage appliances have special hardware to accelerate NFS operations. Those may be able to come close to the same performance as a block storage device. The other option with NFS is running it in software such as a NFS server on Linux configured with /etc/exports and backing the data to a block storage device. This is CPU intensive and would be much slower under load.