SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Accessing servers from Linux over SMB3.1.1 continues to improve in exciting ways. This talk will explore the latest enhancements to the Linux SMB3.1.1 client, enabling more secure, efficient, and compatible access to remote storage across a wide range of SMB3 file servers—including Samba, Azure (the "largest server in the world"), ksmbd, Windows, NetApp, and macOS. There are also exciting improvements to smbdirect (SMB over RDMA), including making this high-performance path easier to use for both the client and server, as well as userspace applications like Samba.
Over the past year, major improvements have been made to performance (e.g. smarter use of directory leases, better metadata caching, and multiple netfs enhancements for improved data caching), security (e.g., new authentication mechanisms and better support for password rotation), and POSIX compatibility (including continued testing and improvement of the SMB3.1.1 POSIX Extensions). Support for special file types has been enhanced, and support for several new Linux system calls has been added. The Linux SMB3.1.1 client remains one of the most active filesystems in the kernel, and userspace tooling has also seen significant evolution. This presentation will also highlight recent progress in the in-kernel SMB server (ksmbd), which is rapidly gaining functionality and performance improvements, making it more useful in embedded, testing, and lightweight server scenarios. Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of how to leverage these new features in real workloads—and a preview of what’s coming next for SMB3.1.1 on Linux.
Learn how recent enhancements —such as improved directory caching, metadata handling, and netfs integration—can improve remote file access efficiency for Linux workloads Understand the latest performance, security, and Linux compatibility enhancements in the Linux SMB3.1.1 client Gain insights into recent developments in SMB over RDMA (smbdirect) in Linux and its unified support across client, server (ksmbd.ko), and userspace Explore the recent improvements to the in-kernel SMB server (ksmbd) and how it fits into lightweight and embedded Linux storage scenarios
Rubrik is a cybersecurity company protecting mission critical data for thousands of customers across the globe including banks, hospitals, and government agencies. SDFS is the filesystem that powers the data path and makes this possible. In this talk, we will discuss challenges in building a masterless distributed filesystem with support for data resilience, strong data integrity, and high performance which can run across a wide spectrum of hardware configurations including cloud platforms. We will discuss the high level architecture of our FUSE based filesystem, how we leverage erasure coding for maintaining data resilience and checksum schemes for maintaining strong data integrity with high performance. We will also cover the challenges in continuously monitoring and maintaining the health of the filesystem in terms of data resilience, data integrity and load balance. Further we will go over how we expand and shrink resources online from the filesystem. We will also discuss the need and challenge of providing priority natively in our filesystem to support a variety of workloads and background operations with varying SLA requirements. Finally, we will also touch on the benefits and challenges of supporting encryption, compression, and de-duplication natively in the filesystem.
GoogleFS introduced the architectural separation of metadata and data, but its reliance on a single active master imposed fundamental limitations on scalability, redundancy, and availability. This talk presents a modern metadata architecture, exemplified by SaunaFS, that eliminates the single-leader model by distributing metadata across multiple concurrent, multi-threaded servers. Metadata is stored in a sharded, ACID-compliant transactional database (e.g., FoundationDB), enabling horizontal scalability, fault tolerance through redundant metadata replicas, reduced memory footprint, and consistent performance under load. The result is a distributed file system architecture capable of exabyte-scale operation in a single namespace while preserving POSIX semantics and supporting workloads with billions of small files.
The performance of network file protocols is a critical factor in the efficiency of the AI and Machine Learning pipeline. This presentation provides a detailed comparative analysis of the two leading protocols, Server Message Block (SMB) and Network File System (NFS), specifically for demanding AI workloads. We evaluate the advanced capabilities of both protocols, comparing SMB3 with SMB Direct and Multichannel against NFS with RDMA and multistream TCP configurations. The industry-standard MLPerf Storage benchmark is used to simulate realistic AI data access patterns, providing a robust foundation for our comparison. The core of this research focuses on quantifying the performance differences and identifying the operational and configuration overhead associated with each technology.
The Samba file server is evolving beyond traditional TCP-based transport. This talk introduces the latest advancements in Samba's networking stack, including full support for SMB over QUIC, offering secure, firewall-friendly file sharing using modern internet protocols. We’ll also explore the ongoing development of SMB over SMB-Direct (RDMA), aimed at delivering low-latency, high-throughput file access for data center and high-performance environments. Join us for a deep dive into these transport innovations, their architecture, current status, and what's next for Samba’s high-performance networking roadmap.
Samba is evolving to meet the demands of modern enterprise IT. The latest advancements bring critical SMB3 capabilities that boost scalability, reliability, and cloud readiness. With features like SMB over QUIC, Transparent Failover, and SMB3 Directory Leases now arriving, Samba is positioning itself as a robust solution for secure, high-performance file services across data centers and hybrid cloud environments. Learn how these enhancements can future-proof your infrastructure - without vendor lock-in.