SMB Synergy

Born in the '80s, the SMB family of protocols has been evolving for many years, with the latest version, SMB3.1.1, continuing to add features in order to support the largest breadth of clients (and an incredibly wide variety of servers). SMB3.1.1 implementations can be found today in various devices, operating systems, appliances, applications, and the cloud … Sustaining protocols require the industry to work together to ensure development standards and guidelines are widely met, and at this conference and other SNIA events we continue to have SMB3.1.1 “Plugfests” to test the wide variety of SMB3.1.1 clients against many server implementations. In this session, we will demonstrate different use cases of the protocol through a variety of clients on a variety of operating systems, accessing the same data, and showing smooth interoperability between the platforms. The demo presents file-sharing connectivity between the most significant SMB clients accessing the Azure server. The panel of clients includes Microsoft, Apple, Linux kernel, Samba, and Visuality Systems. This gives an opportunity to understand the challenges, and the progress, in accessing file data securely and efficiently across the wide variety of modern use cases.