• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • About
    • Stephen Foskett
      • My Publications
        • Urban Forms in Suburbia: The Rise of the Edge City
      • Storage Magazine Columns
      • Whitepapers
      • Multimedia
      • Speaking Engagements
    • Services
    • Disclosures
  • Categories
    • Apple
    • Ask a Pack Rat
    • Computer History
    • Deals
    • Enterprise storage
    • Events
    • Personal
    • Photography
    • Terabyte home
    • Virtual Storage
  • Guides
    • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • The iPhone Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • The iPad Exchange ActiveSync Guide
      • iPad Exchange ActiveSync Troubleshooting Guide
    • Toolbox
      • Power Over Ethernet Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix WWN Calculator
      • EMC Symmetrix TimeFinder DOS Batch File
    • Linux Logical Volume Manager Walkthrough
  • Calendar

Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Understanding the accumulation of data

You are here: Home / Everything / Computer History / A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols

A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols

September 23, 2014 By Stephen 1 Comment

This is a tale of two great kingdoms in Seattle...
This is a tale of two great kingdoms in Seattle…

Once Upon A Time…

Once upon a time, a happy little storage protocol was born. She was loved by her father, Microsoft, and he asked her to work throughout their small kingdom, delivering packages from the castle to clients all around. Sometimes she would be given other odd jobs, like authenticating a visitor, but mostly she delivered files in the kingdom of LAN.

Then one day Microsoft decided that his protocol had grown up and should go see the wider world. He named her CIFS and told her to travel across the Internet and visit other kingdoms, seeking work wherever she went. But most of the other kingdoms resented Microsoft as a bully, so they spurned CIFS. Only Samba, a friendly servant, allowed CIFS into the UNIX kingdoms.

Microsoft didn’t help the situation, since he was constantly at war with the other kingdoms. Sometimes he would even change his mind about allowing CIFS to work with others or tweak her so she would drop her payloads. And wolves began harassing CIFS in the woods, so Microsoft gave her different clothes to wear, making her harder to recognize everywhere. It was a difficult time for CIFS, since all the other kingdoms had their own language and protocols and no one really wanted her around.

Eventually all the kingdoms got used to CIFS, but she never really fit in anywhere but home with Microsoft. The storage arrays got pretty good at working with her, but none of the clients really liked her. They would make fun of her, calling her “chatty” and “insecure” and laughing about the paltry payloads she could carry.

Then one day Microsoft sired a new protocol. His name was SMB 2 and he was born to bring the kingdoms together. By this time, Microsoft had made peace with the UNIX world, even as many of their kingdoms had fallen to the brash upstart Linux and the preening princess Macintosh.

SMB was clever, working with every kingdom so they could learn his language. Samba loved him, and even Macintosh kicked out her darling AFP in favor of SMB 2. Soon he was joined by a big, strong brother named SMB 3 who could do just about anything and worked well with everyone. Although poor CIFS was left to waste her remaining days in outdated data centers, her brothers, open and free, are set to bring file-serving peace to the LAN and the WAN.

Amazon S3: The Sequel to CIFS

Such is the tale of so many enterprise IT protocols: Born to jealous and vindictive market leaders, grudgingly adopted by the rest, and finally set free to evolve and grow on their own. And such will be the case with today’s hottest storage protocol, Amazon’s S3 API.

Amazon AWS is a lot like Microsoft Windows in the 1990’s. It’s the undisputed market leader in its space and thus is the most logical path for challengers to take. Rather than rally around a de jure standard like CDMI, the cloud and object storage industry seems intent on piggybacking on the de facto leader, Amazon S3.

But Amazon isn’t all that keen about all the “workalike” S3 storage platforms out there. Like Microsoft, Amazon probably isn’t losing sleep over these challengers, and neither would waste time intentionally breaking compatibility. But Amazon isn’t going to lose any sleep if revisions to the S3 protocol are incompatible with other implementations. They’re interested in serving their own customers using this proprietary protocol.

Eventually things will change, though. S3 has such widespread adoption and use that it’s inevitable to take over the API-driven cloud storage market. And as other implementations gain market traction, a cry will go up to standardize S3 beyond Amazon’s own use case. Eventually Amazon will let S3 API loose as an open standard or the industry will fork it together, giving rise to an Amazon S3 superset.

Stephen’s Stance

It’s clear how this fairy tale ends. So many companies are using “S3 plus” as their standard interface, and even inside their solutions, that it’s safe to say it’s won the cloud storage API battle. But S3 isn’t a finalized spec – the industry will extend and improve it over the coming years. Soon we’ll have a cloud storage standard based on S3, just like we have a LAN file services standard based on CIFS.

This post came from discussions last week at the Storage Developer Conference and Next Generation Storage Summit. Special thanks to Paul Turner and Charles Eischen from Cloudian, who were present when this fairy tale came to life!

You might also want to read these other posts...

  • Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From…
  • How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12
  • How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier
  • What You See and What You Get When You Follow Me
  • Liberate Wi-Fi Smart Bulbs and Switches with Tasmota!

Filed Under: Computer History, Enterprise storage, Features Tagged With: Amazon, Amazon S3, API, CDMI, CIFS, Cloudian, Microsoft, Next Generation Storage Summit, S3, Samba, SMB 2.0, SMB 3.0, Storage Developer Conference

Primary Sidebar

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Kay

Subscribe via Email

Subscribe via email and you will receive my latest blog posts in your inbox. No ads or spam, just the same great content you find on my site!
 New posts (daily)
 Where's Stephen? (weekly)

Download My Book


Download my free e-book:
Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts!

Recent Posts

How To Install ZeroTier on TrueNAS 12

February 3, 2022

Scam Alert: Fake DMCA Takedown for Link Insertion

January 24, 2022

How To Connect Everything From Everywhere with ZeroTier

January 14, 2022

Electric Car Over the Internet: My Experience Buying From Vroom

November 28, 2020

Powering Rabbits: The Mean Well LRS-350-12 Power Supply

October 18, 2020

Tortoise or Hare? Nvidia Jetson TK1

September 22, 2020

Running Rabbits: More About My Cloud NUCs

September 21, 2020

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

Remove ROM To Use LSI SAS Cards in HPE Servers

August 23, 2020

Test Your Wi-Fi with iPerf for iOS

July 9, 2020

Symbolic Links

    Featured Posts

    Defining Failure: What Is MTTR, MTTF, and MTBF?

    July 6, 2011

    Sony NEX-5 Camera Review

    September 15, 2010

    My Core i7 Macintosh SE

    May 25, 2017

    How To Sync Your iPad With Your Exchange Server

    April 3, 2010

    Free as in Coffee – Thoughts on the State of OpenStack

    May 2, 2016

    Review: Blue Snowball USB Microphone

    March 31, 2010

    On the Death of Innovation, or “These Kids These Days!”

    May 21, 2012

    How Will Cisco Recover From The Consumer Strategy Blunder?

    January 2, 2013

    Are You a Hypervisor Hugger or a Storage Stalwart?

    November 14, 2011

    Generation 3 drobo: Fall In Love All Over Again

    April 9, 2015

    Footer

    Legalese

    Copyright © 2022 · Log in