The SMB protocol evolved over time from CIFS to SMB1 to SMB2, with implementations by dozens of vendors including most major Operating Systems and NAS solutions. The SMB 3.0 protocol had its first commercial implementations by Microsoft, NetApp and EMC by the end of 2012, and many other implementations exist or are in progress. The SMB3 protocol is currently at 3.1.1 and continues to advance.

This SNIA Tutorial begins by describing the history and basic architecture of the SMB protocol and its operations. The second part of the tutorial covers the various versions of the SMB protocol, with details of improvements over time. The final part covers the latest changes in SMB3, and the resources available in support of its development by industry.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand the basic architecture of the SMB protocol family
• Enumerate the main capabilities introduced with SMB 2.0/2.1
• Describe the main capabilities introduced with SMB 3.0 and beyond

Tom Talpey is an Architect in the File Server Team at Microsoft. His responsibilities include SMB 3, SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), and all the protocols and technologies that support the SMB ecosystem. Tom has worked in the areas of network filesystems, network transports and RDMA for many years and recently has been working on storage traffic management, with application not only to SMB but in broad end-to-end scenarios. He is a frequent presenter at Storage Dev.