Microsoft’s place in the datacenter is secure, and Windows Server really hums with SMB 2/3 storage. The enterprise storage industry needed an alternative to Samba and do-it-yourself SMB servers, and it’s good to see Visuality Systems step up with NQ Storage. Although I have not seen it in action, their OEM claims sound good and their roadmap looks right.
SMB 2.0
A Fairy Tale of Two Storage Protocols
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.
Samba 4.0 is Released with Full Active Directory and Updated SMB Support
Samba is becoming more and more important. Windows servers will increasingly use SMB 3.0 as their networked storage protocol in Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3. And EMC’s purchase of Likewise means the rest of the storage industry is looking for an SMB stack. But I’m most interested to see what Active Directory support means for future home and business devices.
Who Will Support SMB 3.0, and Which Features Will They Support?
I’m really thrilled about the improvements Microsoft is making to the core SMB protocol in Windows Server 2012. But it won’t really matter if nobody but Microsoft supports the new protocol. So I like to call out to all the enterprise storage vendors: Let me hear your support for SMB3.0!
Why You Should Never Again Utter The Word, “CIFS”
CIFS is not the network storage protocol used by Microsoft Windows, and many other clients. The protocol used to share files over a LAN by the majority of personal computers is called SMB. I wish everyone in the industry would get that through their heads.