What’s new with SMB3?

This talk will explore new capabilities that are proposed to be added to SMB3 for supporting emerging scenarios like containers, direct-access filesystem (DAX ) and large scale-out clusters with affinitized storage. Containerized workloads accessing data hosted on a remote share typically authenticate to the remote resource using the identity of the container or a pre-plumbed credential setup by an administrator. We explore “identity tunneling” extensions to the protocol to allow applications to tunnel their identity to the server on top of an existing authenticated SMB session. Direct access storage (Storage Class Memory (SCM) /Persistent Memory (PM)) is now being deployed in more and more scenarios where low-latency IO is required. SMBDirect/RDMA provides a mechanism for clients to directly access DAX storage on a server. We will look at various approaches to accessing DAX storage – first via the existing SMB3 protocol and potential enhancements to mostly bypass the software stack on the client and server. Lastly in the context of a large scale-out cluster, we’ll take a look at enhancements to the SMB3 protocol to automatically direct the cluster-node hosting the data need by the client. This complements some of the functionality provided by the Witness protocol – and is a step towards scaling out data access via the SMB3 protocol.