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EMC Support for the SMB 3.0 Protocol – the Future of Storage Protocols

One of the key issues this blog has covered recently is the transformation of storage.  Microsoft is focused on helping customers control the costs of storage, whether by using industry-standard hardware or simplifying existing hardware infrastructure.  To that end we have made significant investments in the SMB 3.0 protocol for file-based storage.  This helps customers use existing network infrastructure to achieve Fibre Channel-like performance, regardless of the underlying storage subsystem.

EMC has announced support for the Server Message Block 3.0 protocol in their VNX and VNXe product lines and published a brief paper entitled, “EMC VNX and VNXe with Microsoft SMB 3.0 – The best of NAS and SAN without compromise.”  It’s a great read.

In it, they highlight the benefits of SMB 3.0 and how storage that uses it can offer the performance and capabilities comparable to traditional SAN storage.  With solutions based on SMB 3.0 you can avoid the costs of Fibre Channel implementations.

The paper also highlights how SMB 3.0 is the future of storage protocols – providing the performance and availability customers need to move mission-critical workloads to network-attached storage platforms based on SMB 3.0.

EMC and Microsoft are performing regular interoperability tests, so you can confidently deploy EMC VNX and VNXe products in a Windows Server 2012 environment. These EMC products are compatible with the SMB 3.0 functionality provided by Windows Server file servers with transparent failover that we discussed in a previous post.

Microsoft is committed to helping customers reduce the costs of storage while managing data efficiently.  SMB 3.0 is an example of how we’re delivering on the commitment and helping to build an ecosystem of storage solutions.

You can read more technical information about our storage capabilities at Jose Barreto’s storage blog on TechNet.  You can also explore SMB 3.0 and many other storage capabilities hands-on by downloading the Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview here – which will become generally available October 18.