Sep 4, 2007

Windows Server 2008, the storage story

On the Windows Server Division Weblog, Claude Lorenson is writing about "the future of SMB". He delivers some very interesting details about Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) and the new features of SMB 2.0. It's obvious that Microsoft invests in SMB, especially to make it usable for the loosely coupled branch offfice scenarios:
    SMB 2.0 greatly improves the scalability of SMB 1.0; there is now more open files on a server supported as well as a higher number of shares supported. The protocols have been enhanced to reduce the “chattiness” that makes file sharing on a WAN sometimes painful. With SMB 2.0, customer data has shown the ability to download a 300MB file 35 times faster than with SMB 1.0 using a 100 Mbps link (from 24 minutes to 41 seconds). SMB2.0 will also support transactions, symbolic links and client side encryption. All these features are fully functional when Vista clients are used in combination with Windows Server 2008.
But there is also an important side note which may change a lot when planning next generation storage infrastructures:
    The following sentence: "SMB2.0 will also support transactions, symbolic links and client side encryption" is not correct. Transaction support and client side encryption will not be available in Windows Server 2008 and therefore are not in the beta 3 release either.]
Wow... still no SMB encryption. I remember Microsoft is promising this feature since the late 90's. It looks like WebDAV will continue to be the only native file access protocol in Windows Clients which support communication encryption.

See the full story here:
Windows Server 2008, the storage story
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I thought Encrypted Filesystem (EFS) is available on all versions of Windows 2000 and later - what has changed here?

Will Price

September 4, 2007 at 1:38 AM
Joelle an Dyck said...

Hi Will,

that's right, EFS is still available. But EFS with SMB is encrypting the files, not the communication. Technically the implementation creates a user profile on the server and encrypts the files locally on the file server for the requesting user. The files themselves are copied unencrypted over the wire (or air). Microsoft wanted to change this by developing "client encryption" for EFS/SMB but they removed it from the Longhorn roadmap. The only situation where EFS encrypts on the client and by this transports the files encrypted oder the wire is WebDAV/EFS.

Joelle

September 4, 2007 at 9:48 AM

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