#111: SMB3 Landscape and Directions

SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. With the recent advances in persistent memory technologies, we will take a look at how we can leverage the SMB3 protocol in conjunction with SMBDirect/RDMA to provide very low latency access to persistent memory devices across the network. With the increasing popularity of cloud storage - technologies like Azure Files which provide seamless access to cloud stored data via the standard SMB3 protocol is seeing significant interest. One of the key requirements in this space is to be able to run SMB3 over a secure / firewall friendly internet protocol. We will take a quick look at some work we are doing to enable SMB3 over QUIC - which is a recent UDP based transport with strong security and interop properties. We will also explore some work we have done to enable on-the-wire compression for SMB3. Learning Objectives: 1) Learn how we can use SMB3 to setup direct RDMA access to remote persistent memory; 2) Using QUIC as a transport for SMB3; 3) How can we use data compression algorithms to optimize SMB data transfer?