The Future of File Protocols: SMB 2.2 in the Data Center

This talk will introduce SMB 2.2, the next version of the SMB2 protocol, which has been significantly re-designed to support the levels of performance, reliability, continuous availability, scale, and features that are required for server applications. The prior focus of SMB/SMB2/CIFS was in providing Information Worker desktops with shared access to their data. This objective continues with SMB 2.2 to further reduce chattiness and improve end-user responsiveness. However, due to the customer demand for large scale shared file storage in the data center, SMB 2.2 includes major new features to address requirements for transparent failover, bandwidth scale, and application consistent backups. This talk will go through the requirements that server application workloads pose for shared file storage, and describe opportunities for the SMB2 eco-system to move forward to provide shared storage for the virtualized data center, business critical databases, web serving, and other server application workloads.