Today was Microsoft’s day.
…but it was a good day. Microsoft demonstrated their new SMB2.2 implementation which, despite the fact that it is very early pre-beta code, worked impressively well.
The key things I care about SMB2.2 are these:
- File server clustering in a variety of modes is supported.
- Application server failover (that is, client failover) also is supported.
- Multipath is supported and scaling is almost linear.
- Distributed caching (BranchCache™) has been updated.
- SMB2.2 can run over RDMA (using Infiniband, etc.)
Most of all… They demoed this stuff and are making documentation available pre-beta, so the rest of us can get a running start on implementing it.
It would be nice if the SMB protocol were an open standard, debated and designed by representatives of several development teams. It’s not, and that has caused problems in the past. In this case, however, my first impressions were very positive. The pro-active approach to getting documentation out to the SMB/CIFS community was a vast improvement.
Not to be forgotten:
Ric Wheeler of Red Hat gave the keynote at the start of the day, well before Microsoft took the stage. His presentation was quite timely. He talked about engaging with the Linux Kernel community, developing new storage features, and getting them into the Linux kernel.