SMB 3.

0 brings fault tolerant features, more speed

1 of 5

about:reader?url=http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/tip/SMB-30...

searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com

SMB 3.0 brings fault tolerant features,

more speed
bySerdar Yegulalp

Server Message Block is the standard way Windows systems share

files and folders, among other things. The origins of SMB can be
traced back to IBM in the Disk Operating System (DOS) era, but
Microsoft reverse-engineered it for their LAN Manager product and
have been adding their own proprietary modifications to it ever
since.
SMB 2.0, for instance, contained changes Microsoft made to allow
(among other things) SMB to be routed more efficiently over
wide-area networks (WANs), which are used more as Internet
adoption grows. The biggest changes made in SMB 3.0 (formerly
SMB 2.2) can be roughly divided into three overarching categories:
speed, fault tolerance and miscellaneous improvements. Some
features might overlap slightly between categories, but the first two
rubrics are the most crucial for SMB.

20-08-2015 10:38:PM

SMB 3.0 brings fault tolerant features, more speed

2 of 5

about:reader?url=http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/tip/SMB-30...

Speed
Over the course of its lifetime, Server Message Block (SMB) has
been revised to improve the speed of transfers across multiple
network media and under adverse network conditions.
SMB Direct. This feature makes use of another Windows Server 8
feature: Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). With RDMA, two
servers linked via the appropriate networking hardware (e.g.,
InfiniBand, iWARP or RDMA over Converged Ethernet [RoCE]) can
transfer data in a memory-to-memory fashion. Think of it as a
networked implementation of the way Direct Memory Access (DMA)
worked in local machines, where a disk or network controller could
access memory directly, without needing the CPU. SMB Direct
extends SMB to use RDMA, allowing more data to be transferred
with less overhead in the rest of the system. Note that, as with
other SMB 3.0 features, both ends have to be running SMB 3.0
(and in this case, using compatible hardware) to use this feature.
SMB Multichannel. Many servers have more than one network
interface, either for redundancy, multiplexing of network capacity, or
both. This feature allows multiple network interfaces in a server to
be used by SMB, both for improving performance with channel
bonding and by using multiple network paths for fault tolerance.
SMB Directory Leasing. BranchCache users will appreciate this
one. Many of them sync files with a central office over a
high-latency, slower, WAN Directory Leasing takes some of the pain
out of this process by caching file and directory metadata so that
the branch office needs to make less round trips to the central

20-08-2015 10:38:PM

SMB 3.0 brings fault tolerant features, more speed

3 of 5

about:reader?url=http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/tip/SMB-30...

server, and so that the apps that use those files respond more
quickly.
Fault tolerance
A common element of features created for a server environment is
some form of fault tolerance. Windows Server has a fault-tolerant
file system and fault-tolerant clustering, so it only makes sense that
SMB should add a kind of fault-tolerant functionality as well.
VSS. The Volume ShadowCopy Service (VSS) has long been used
to protect local volumes from damage and to allow volume
snapshotting for backups, but now its functionality has been added
to SMB as well. Data available on SMB file shares are now
available for any applications that are VSS-aware; for example,
backup apps, which would make it easier to back up server shares
that might be crucial to a local app's functionality.
Node fault tolerance. If you have an SMB share hosted on a server
that's a cluster node, SMB 3.0 makes sure that failovers between
nodes allow SMB shares to be handed off without issues -especially for applications that have shares in use. Among other
things, this functionality makes it easier to perform maintenance on
nodes without first having to disconnect everyone from SMB shares
on a given node.
Everything else
The rest of the most important new SMB features don't fit easily into
either of the above categories, so they're lumped together below:

20-08-2015 10:38:PM

SMB 3.0 brings fault tolerant features, more speed

4 of 5

about:reader?url=http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/tip/SMB-30...

SMB Scale-Out. This is another clustering-related feature -- one

which mixes speed and fault-tolerance functionality. A cluster of
servers that all share the same folders can have, under SMB 3.0,
the aggregate bandwidth of all the nodes in the cluster that are
used to satisfy demand for those shares. This feature is a cousin to
the SMB Multichannel feature described above, but it's more about
content distribution than mere load balancing (although Scale-Out
does make certain load-balancing operations easier and more
automatic).
SMB encryption. For those concerned about wire-level security,
data sent over SMB can be encrypted in transit with very little work
involved on the admin's side. This can be done no matter what the
intervening network medium is; it doesn't matter if it's happening on
a local area network (LAN) or across a WAN branch-office
connection. The latter will most likely find more use than the former,
although I can imagine a few scenarios where people would want to
be protected from even the possibility of internal leaks using this
method.
Conclusions
Most of the revisions SMB 3.0 delivers are aimed at making SMB
that much more useful in clusters and wide-area networks, two
places that might well have shied away from any reliance on SMB
in the past. SMB had a (rightly deserved) reputation for being a
brittle old-school technology, so it either had to be worked around or
avoided entirely. These new changes may help spark a
reconsideration of using SMB once Windows Server 2012 has been
released and has had some time to enjoy wider acceptance than

20-08-2015 10:38:PM

SMB 3.0 brings fault tolerant features, more speed

5 of 5

about:reader?url=http://searchwindowsserver.techtarget.com/tip/SMB-30...

just the labs where it's currently being evaluated.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Serdar Yegulalp has been writing about computers and IT for more
than 15 years for a variety of publications,
including InformationWeek and Windows Magazine.

20-08-2015 10:38:PM