Introduction 

Maybe you’re lucky enough to work for a company that has standardized on SharePoint portals and ASP.NET applications across the board. In that case, you do not need to integrate different types of portals and web applications. For most large corporations, though, there will be many portals and different technologies behind those portals. I am currently working with one of those large enterprises that use non-Microsoft portals (from Linux/Apache/PHP sites all to the way to WebSphere) that need to integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

The question on how to integrate those with SharePoint is asked quite often. Sometimes there is a need to leverage content stored in SharePoint sites. In some cases SharePoint must consume data hosted in the other portals. There are many options to integrate SharePoint in those cases, so I compiled a list of different technologies you can leverage. Please note that I do not include in the list any of the WSS/MOSS SDK facilities to integrate with other ASP.NET applications, focusing on options applicable when working with a portal not hosted in a Microsoft-centric environment. I included ideas on how to integrate by producing and consuming links, e-mails, RSS feeds, IFrames, WSRP portlets, Web Services and Search.

1. Links

One simple way to integrate two web applications is simply providing links from one to the other. If you maintain a similar User Interface in both, users might not even notice the transitions.

1a. Links – Producer

SharePoint is fundamentally an ASP.NET application and you can link to any WSS or MOSS site, list, library or item directly. There are also ways to link directly to specific views or actions associated with items. It would be possible, for instance, to have a URL pointing directly to the page that adds an item to a list.

1b. Links – Consumer

SharePoint also provides rich support for hosting external links. You can use the built-in navigation facilities to link to items hosted outside MOSS. For instance, you can add a top navigation link or a quick launch link directly to a URL outside MOSS. You also have the choice to open the link in a new window or not. You also have a specific list type to store links and you can add external sites in other areas like the Site Directory. There are also many other out-of-the-box web parts where you can link to something living outside SharePoint.

Reference: How to customize navigation: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA101191001033.aspx

2. E-mail

E-mail via the SMTP protocol is something that we have used reliably for a long time. You can get data in and out of SharePoint using it and you’ll likely find some level of support in many other portals.

2a. E-mail – Producer

You can get e-mail alerts from any SharePoint list and it should not be hard to use that information to populate information in another portal. You can also associate a custom workflow to any list to send an e-mail to an external address every time a list item is added or updated, with the ability to format the body of the e-mail with properties of the item. Although those alerts and workflow-generated e-mails are typically sent to humans, they could be useful in an integration scenario, especially if your target can parse the mail message to isolate the individual properties. 

2b. E-mail – Consumer

You can configure any SharePoint list to be mail-enabled. With that, you can send e-mails directly to a SharePoint discussion list, add a blog entry or post a document attached to a message to a document library. A workflow or event handler could be use to further process items received that way to perform specific actions as these items are added.

Reference: How to add content to sites using e-mails: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA100867301033.aspx

3. RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a simple format to describe digital content. RSS is increasingly used on the Internet to provide information about frequently updated information like news feeds and blog posts.

3a. RSS – Producer

You can enable any SharePoint list (including document libraries, calendars, task lists, blogs and wiki libraries) to provide an RSS feed. You have options to select which columns are provided in the feed (like title, date and author) and you can set a limit for the number of items and how old the items can be. Each RSS feed for a specific list has a URL and it comes to the client as an XML document.

References: How to manage RSS feeds: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA100214251033.aspx

3b. RSS – Consumer

SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box web part called “RSS Viewer”, which allows you to place an RSS feed in any WSS page. You have a number of configuration options including obviously the URL where the feed comes from, how many items should be displayed and multiple options on how each one is shown.

4. IFrame

IFrames are HTML elements that let you display an HTML page inside another one. Most modern browsers will let you place this <iframe> HTML markup within a page, specifying the URL to the other page and the dimensions of the frame, among other options.

Reference: IFrame: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/frames.html

4a. IFrame – Producer

You obviously can include any SharePoint page into a page in another portal using an IFrame. The main issue there is the fact that you will get the MOSS navigation in that IFrame, which typically is not desired. To overcome that, you can create a special MOSS page that hides all those elements and show just the element you want to expose. To accomplish that, you can create a “minimal” master page and a simple layout with a single web part zone.

Reference: How to create a minimal master page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa660698.aspx

4b. IFrame – Consumer

SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box web part called “Page Viewer”, which allows you to display any other page as an IFrame.

5. WSRP

Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) aims to standardize interactions between portals using a special set of markups to make it easy to consume a portion of the overall user portal without having to write unique code.

Reference: WSRP 1.0 specification from OASIS: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/3343/oasis-200304-wsrp-specification-1.0.pdf

5a. WSRP – Producer

Microsoft does not provide an out-of-the-box WSRP producer. However, you can leverage a third party solution like NetUnity Software to provide that functionality.

Reference: Blog about WSRP in SharePoint: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikefitz/archive/2006/02/06/525536.aspx
Reference: NetUnity Software web site: http://www.netunitysoftware.com

5b. WSRP – Consumer

SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box web part called “WSRP Consumer Web Part”, which allows you to display a WSRP portlet in a MOSS page.

Reference: How to use the WSRP Consumer Web Part: http://www.wssdemo.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=d5813c18%2D934f%2D4fd6%2D9068%2D5cdd59ce56ba&ID=234

6. Web Services

Web Services (as defined by the W3C) are a series of standards to allow computers to communicate using XML messages and SOAP, describing their operations via WSDL. If a system exposes their functionality that way, any client supporting those standards can interact with it.

Reference: http://www.w3.org/2002/ws

6a. Web Services – Producer

SharePoint exposes a lot of its functionality using Web Services over HTTP. This can be used, for instance, to get a list of libraries on a site, to add an item to a list, to get information about users, etc. SharePoint web services are implemented using the .NET Framework and they use SOAP, XML and HTTP, also providing a WSDL. The SharePoint SDK includes a complete reference of all the web services available and the list includes: Administration, Alerts, Authentication, Copy, Document Workspace, Forms, Imaging, List Data Retrieval, Lists, Meetings, People, Permissions, SharePoint Directory Management, Site Data, Sites, Search, Users and Groups, Versions, Views, Web Part Pages, and Webs.

Reference: List of Web Services in WSS/MOSS: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms445760.aspx

6b. Web Services – Consumer

SharePoint can leverage web services exposed by other applications using the Business Data Catalog (BDC). This is done using an XML-based definition of what is exposed by that application and usually involves describing entities, properties and actions that are exposed by that application. Once the BDC definition is in place, you can expose those via the BDC-related web parts. You can also integrate the BDC data as a content source for Search. Another option is to write a custom web part that consumes the external web service and provides a user interface to interact with it.

Reference: Business Data Catalog Overview: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms551230.aspx

P.S.: Also, as suggested by Ian Morrish, the Data Form Web Part (known as Data View Web Part in the previous version) can render Web Services and XML using XSL. For details around this, check http://www.sharepointblogs.com/ssa/archive/2007/02/24/showing-web-service-data-in-a-data-view-web-part.aspx

7. Search

Search is usually a main component of a portal. When two portals are interacting, they will typically need to search or be searched by each other.

7a. Search – Producer

SharePoint exposes all its data via HTTP and you can configure any search engine to crawl it. The search engine would start with a site directory and for each site it will use the “View All Site Content” link on the quick launch to discover all lists and libraries on the site. SharePoint also has a crawl web service that could be leveraged to enumerate all site collections even if you don’t have a site directory.

Reference: How the MOSS crawl works: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2007/03/19/crawling-sharepoint-sites-using-the-sps3-protocol-handler.aspx

7b. Search – Consumer

SharePoint can index several types of content sources beyond SharePoint sites. That includes any HTTP-based web site, file shares using SMB and anything you are consuming via the BDC. You basically need to define a content source in the Search SSP to describe how and when your crawl should run. You can also develop your own protocol handler to address custom scenarios.

Reference: How SharePoint crawls content: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f32cb02e-e396-46c5-a65a-e1b045152b6b1033.mspx

8. WebDav

Although not really an integration technology, WebDAV provides a way to download and upload files hosted in SharePoint. This is what clients leverage for the explorer view and there are many clients that can interact that way.

9. AJAX

AJAX is not a specific technology but a set of technologies, mostly related to using client-side javascript to asynchronously do post backs and partial page refreshes. If you are using AJAX, you can leverage some of the other technologies mentioned here to interact with SharePoint. There is no out-of-the-box web part to host AJAX code, but there’s already many discussions detailing how to support this scenario and leverage it inside a web part.

Reference: Information about ASP.NET-based AJAX: http://ajax.asp.net
Reference: Building a web part that uses AJAX: http://www.capdes.com/2007/02/microsoft_office_sharepoint_se.html
Reference: Building a web part that uses AJAX: http://sharethispoint.com/archive/2007/02/28/Using-a-SPGridView-inside-an-ASP.net-Ajax-UpdatePanel.aspx

Conclusion 

I hope that helps you sort out the multiple different integration points and will allow you to choose the best technology for your specific case. There are certainly a lot of details to account for, like whether you are planning to write custom code to help with the integration (and if you are, on what side you will be hosting that code) and how the authentication between the two systems will work (Kerberos is your friend and so is MOSS 2007 SSO).

I find the RSS feeds option quite interesting, since it is easy to implement, provides much more functionality than simple links, allows for some level of customization and could even work well with an AJAX-type solution. If you can get away with that one, you will certainly have a lot less to worry about.

Introduction

SMB (Server Message Block) is a remote file protocol commonly used by Microsoft Windows clients and servers that dates back to 1980’s. Back when it was first used, LANs speeds were typically 10Mbps or less, WAN use was very limited and there were no Wireless LANs. Network security concerns like preventing man-in-the-middle attacks were non-existent at that time. Obviously, things have changed a lot since then. SMB did evolve over time, but it did so incrementally and with great care for keeping backward compatibility. It was only with SMB2 in 2007 that we had the first major redesign.

A History of SMB and CIFS

When it was first introduced to the public, the remote file protocol was called SMB (Server Message Block). SMB was used, for instance, by Microsoft LAN Manager in 1987 and by Windows for Workgroups in 1992. Later, a draft specification was submitted to the IETF under the name Common Internet File System (CIFS). The CIFS specification is a description of the protocol as it was implemented in 1996 as part of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. A preliminary draft of the IETF CIFS 1.0 specification was published in 1997. Later, extensions were made to address other scenarios like domains, Kerberos, shadow copy, server to server copy and SMB signing. Windows 2000 (released in 2000) included those extensions. At that time, some people went back to calling the protocol SMB once again. CIFS/SMB has also been implemented on Unix, Linux and many other operating systems (either as part of the OS or as a server suite like Samba). A few times, those communities also extended the CIFS/SMB protocol to address their own specific requirements.

One important limitation of SMB was its “chattiness” and lack of concern for network latency. It would take a series of synchronous round trips to accomplish many of the most common tasks. The protocol was not created with WAN or high-latency networks in mind and there was limited use of compounding (combining multiple commands in a single network packet) or pipelining (sending additional commands before the answer to a previous command arrives). This even led to products created to address the specific issues around SMB WAN acceleration. There were also limitations regarding the number of open files, shares and users. Due to the large number of commands and subcommands, the protocol was also difficult to extend, maintain and secure.

Introducing SMB2

The first major redesign of SMB happened with the release of SMB2 by Microsoft. SMB2 was introduced with Windows Vista in 2007 and updated with the release of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 in 2008.

SMB2 brought a number of improvements, including but not limited to:

• Reduced complexity, going from over 100 commands and subcommands to just 19 (see details below)
• General mechanisms for data pipelining and credit-based flow control (see details below)
• Request compounding, which allows multiple SMB requests to be sent as a single network request (see details below)
• Larger reads and writes make better use of faster networks, even with high latency
• Caching of folder and file properties, where clients keeps local copy of information on folders and files
• Durable handles allow an SMB2 connection to transparently reconnect to the server if there is a temporary loss of network connectivity
• Message signing improved (HMAC SHA-256 replaces MD5 as hashing algorithm) and configuration/interoperability issues simplified
• Improved scalability for file sharing (number of users, shares and open files per server greatly increased)
• Protocol works well with Network Address Translation (VC count is gone)
• Extension mechanism (for instance, create context or variable offsets)
• Support for symbolic links

It is important to highlight that, to ensure interoperability, SMB2 uses the existing SMB1 connection setup mechanisms, and then advertises that it is capable of a new version of the protocol. Because of that, if the opposite end does not support SMB2, SMB1 will be used.

The SMB2 protocol specification was published publicly by Microsoft and you can find the link at the end of this post.

Reduced Complexity

One of the ways to showcase the reduced complexity in SMB2 is to make a comparison to the commands and subcommands in the old version.

Here is the complete list of the 19 opcodes (or commands) used by SMB2 in the message exchanges between the client and the server, grouped in three categories:

• Protocol negotiation, user authentication and share access (NEGOTIATE, SESSION_SETUP, LOGOFF, TREE_CONNECT, TREE_DISCONNECT)
• File, directory and volume access (CANCEL, CHANGE_NOTIFY, CLOSE, CREATE, FLUSH, IOCTL, LOCK, QUERY_DIRECTORY, QUERY_INFO, READ, SET_INFO, WRITE)
• Other (ECHO, OPLOCK_BREAK)

When you try to get a similar list for the old SMB, things get a little more complex. I tried to make a list of all commands and subcommands using only the documents linked below and came up with over 100:

• Protocol negotiation, user authentication and share access (NEGOTIATE, SESSION_SETUP_ANDX, TRANS2_SESSION_SETUP, LOGOFF_ANDX, PROCESS_EXIT, TREE_CONNECT, TREE_CONNECT_ANDX, TREE_DISCONNECT)
• File, directory and volume access (CHECK_DIRECTORY, CLOSE, CLOSE_PRINT_FILE, COPY, CREATE, CREATE_DIRECTORY, CREATE_NEW, CREATE_TEMPORARY, DELETE, DELETE_DIRECTORY, FIND_CLOSE, FIND_CLOSE2, FIND_UNIQUE, FLUSH, GET_PRINT_QUEUE,  IOCTL, IOCTL_SECONDARY, LOCK_AND_READ, LOCK_BYTE_RANGE, LOCKING_ANDX, MOVE, NT_CANCEL, NT_CREATE_ANDX, NT_RENAME, NT_TRANSACT, NT_TRANSACT_CREATE, NT_TRANSACT_IOCTL, NT_TRANSACT_NOTIFY_CHANGE, NT_TRANSACT_QUERY_QUOTA, NT_TRANSACT_QUERY_SECURITY_DESC, NT_TRANSACT_RENAME, NT_TRANSACT_SECONDARY, NT_TRANSACT_SET_QUOTA, NT_TRANSACT_SET_SECURITY_DESC, OPEN, OPEN_ANDX, OPEN_PRINT_FILE, QUERY_INFORMATION, QUERY_INFORMATION_DISK, QUERY_INFORMATION2, READ, READ_ANDX, READ_BULK, READ_MPX, READ_RAW, RENAME, SEARCH, SEEK, SET_INFORMATION, SET_INFORMATION2, TRANS2_CREATE_DIRECTORY, TRANS2_FIND_FIRST2, TRANS2_FIND_NEXT2, TRANS2_FIND_NOTIFY_FIRST, TRANS2_FIND_NOTIFY_NEXT, TRANS2_FSCTL , TRANS2_GET_DFS_REFERRAL, TRANS2_IOCTL2, TRANS2_OPEN2, TRANS2_QUERY_FILE_INFORMATION, TRANS2_QUERY_FS_INFORMATION, TRANS2_QUERY_PATH_INFORMATION, TRANS2_QUERY_PATH_INFORMATION, TRANS2_REPORT_DFS_INCONSISTENCY, TRANS2_SET_FILE_INFORMATION, TRANS2_SET_FS_INFORMATION, TRANS2_SET_PATH_INFORMATION, TRANSACTION, TRANSACTION_SECONDARY, TRANSACTION2, TRANSACTION2_SECONDARY, UNLOCK_BYTE_RANGE, WRITE, WRITE_AND_CLOSE, WRITE_AND_UNLOCK, WRITE_ANDX, WRITE_BULK, WRITE_BULK_DATA, WRITE_COMPLETE, WRITE_MPX, WRITE_MPX_SECONDARY, WRITE_PRINT_FILE, WRITE_RAW)
• Other (ECHO, TRANS_CALL_NMPIPE, TRANS_MAILSLOT_WRITE, TRANS_PEEK_NMPIPE, TRANS_QUERY_NMPIPE_INFO, TRANS_QUERY_NMPIPE_STATE, TRANS_RAW_READ_NMPIPE, TRANS_RAW_WRITE_NMPIPE, TRANS_READ_NMPIPE, TRANS_SET_NMPIPE_STATE, TRANS_TRANSACT_NMPIPE, TRANS_WAIT_NMPIPE, TRANS_WRITE_NMPIPE)

I make no claim that the list above for SMB is exact or complete, but it does make a point. As an interesting exercise, check the lists above to verify that, while SMB2 has a single WRITE operation, there are 14 distinct WRITE operations in the old protocol.

SMB2 also requires TCP as a transport. SMB2 no longer supports NetBIOS over IPX, NetBIOS over UDP or NetBEUI (as SMB version 1 did).

Pipelining

A key improvement in SMB2 is the way it makes it easy for clients to send a number of outstanding requests to a server. This allows the client to build a pipeline of requests instead of waiting for a response before sending the next request.  This is especially relevant when using a high latency network.

SMB2 uses a credit based flow control, which allows the server to control a client’s behavior. The server will start with a small number of credits and automatically scale up as needed. With this, the protocol can keep more data “in flight” and better utilize the available bandwidth.

This is key to make a large transfer go from hours (in SMB) to minutes (in SMB2) in a “long and fat pipe” (high bandwidth, high latency network).

For an example of how pipelining in SMB2 can improve performance, check this other blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/11/11/file-server-performance-improvements-with-the-smb2-protocol-in-windows-server-2008.aspx

Compounding

When you look at the command set for the new SMB2 protocol, you notice that they are all simple operations. The old SMB1 protocol had some complex commands and subcommands that combined a set of simple operations as required in specific scenarios.

One of the important changes in SMB2 is the ability to send an arbitrary set of commands in a single request (single network round trip). This is called compounding and it can be use to mimic the old complex operations in SMB1 without the added complexity of a larger command set.

For instance, an old SMB1 RENAME command can be replaced by a single request in SMB2 that combines three commands: CREATE (which can create a new file or open an existing file), SET_INFO and CLOSE. The same can be done for many other complex SMB1 commands and subcommands like LOCK_AND_READ and WRITE_AND_UNLOCK.

This compounding ability in SMB2 is very flexible and the chain of commands can be unrelated (executed separately, potentially in parallel) or related (executed in sequence, with the output of one command available to the next). The responses can also be compounded or sent separately.

This new compounding feature in SMB2 can be used to perform a specific task in less time due to the reduced number of network round trips.

Conclusion

I hope this post has helped you understand some of the important improvements in SMB2, particularly in regards to reduced complexity, pipelining and compounding.

Reference

Below is a list of important links that document SMB2, SMB and CIFS, including the latest protocol specifications published by Microsoft:

[MS-SMB2]: Server Message Block (SMB) Version 2.0 Protocol Specification
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc212614.aspx

[MS-SMB]: Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol Specification
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc212363.aspx

[MS-CIFS]: Common Internet File System (CIFS) Protocol Specification
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee442092(PROT.13).aspx

Microsoft Protocol Programs
http://www.microsoft.com/protocols

Here's also a few publicly available presentations on SMB2:

SNIA Tutorial on SMB2 by Jim Pinkerton
http://www.snia.org/images/tutorial_docs/Networking/JimPinkerton-SMB2_Big_Improvements_Remote_FS_Protocol-v3.pdf

SDC Presentation on SMB 2.1 by David Kruse
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/DavidKruse_SMBv21.pdf

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 6th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 14th. This event is also co-located with the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest. For those working with storage technologies, this event gathers a unique crowd and includes a rich agenda that you can find at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/agenda2009.

Looking at the agenda, you can see it includes presentations and/or panels with key industry players like Amazon, Brocade, EMC, Emulex, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Isilon, The Linux Foundation, LSI, Microsoft, NetApp, The Samba Team, Sun, Symantec, Tata, Ubiqx, Western Digital and Wipro, just to mention a few names you should readily recognize.

Microsoft is the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest Underwriter and the presentations from Microsoft include topics like BranchCache, Green Technologies, Data Classification on File Servers, Windows File System Transactions, SMB version 2.1, Storage in Virtual Machine Manager, SMB2 Model Based Testing, File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT), DFS-Namespaces Scalability, Storage Management and Delete Notifications in Windows 7. Microsoft is also participating in the panel on Cloud Storage. I am helping deliver the presentations on FSCT and DFS-N, along with a few colleagues, and I will also spend time at the PlugFest.

On last thing about the SDC and probably one of the most important ones is that the presentations are usually delivered to developers by the actual product teams and frequently the actual developer of the technology is either delivering the presentation or is in the room to take questions. That kind of deep insight is not common in every conference out there. For instance, I remember last year when there was a discussion (during Q&A) about something related to both NTFS and SMB. It was great to see senior developers from both teams in the room (one was the presenter and one was in the audience), discussing with attendees a specific topic that spanned both the local file system and the remote file serving protocol.

Registration is open at  http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/ and you should definitely plan to be there. If you are attending, leave a comment and let’s plan to meet when we get there!

Version 1.0 of the File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) was announced yesterday during a presentation by Jian Yan and  Bartosz Nyczkowski at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The presentation covered a number of details about FSCT and included a demo running FSCT with the HomeFolders workload.

If you are not familiar with FSCT, the download page offers this overview: “File server capacity planning and performance troubleshooting are critical aspects of high-level network administration. Central file servers and distributed client workstations are now the norm in most corporate networks. This structure reduces storage capacity requirements, centralizes backup, increases the availability of files, and simplifies the document revision and review process. However, because data storage and access are centralized, performance limitations impact the entire network population. Accurately projecting the number of users that hardware can support under a specific workload, and understanding when and where bottlenecks occur, are critical to making efficient improvements to the server configuration. File server capacity planning tools can be valuable in choosing new hardware for purchase, identifying the capacity of existing hardware, locating existing bottlenecks, and planning for resource expansion in advance of resource exhaustion. The throughput capacity of a file server can be expressed either as the maximum number of operations per second or a maximum number of users supported by the configuration. These values are influenced by several factors, some of which include processor speed, available memory, disk speed, network throughput and latency, and the speed with which SMB requests are processed.”

The final version is available for download in both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions. It is supported on  Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista and  Windows 7 (with the latest service pack applied).

Downloads are available now:
x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b20db7f1-15fd-40ae-9f3a-514968c65643
x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0b212272-1884-4af1-972d-42ef1db9f977

A white paper is also included in the download packages, with detailed description of the tool, step-by-step instructions on how to use it and reference of the command line interface.

For questions about FSCT and how to use it, please use the forum at
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/fsct/threads

Also check some details on FSCT on these previous posts (from the release of the beta last year and the release candidate back in July):
http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/07/08/file-server-capacity-tool-fsct-release-candidate-available-for-download.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/10/06/fsct-a-cifs-smb-smb2-file-server-tool-for-capacity-planning-and-performance-troubleshooting.aspx

This is a major milestone in the two-year journey to offer this tool publicly, which included efforts from a number of people from different teams at Microsoft, including the File Server Team and the Windows Performance Team.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 7th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 20th. As usual, Microsoft is underwriting the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest, which is co-located with the SDC event.

For developers working with storage-related technologies, this event gathers a unique crowd and includes a rich agenda that you can find at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2010/agenda2010.  All the key industry players are represented. It lists presentations from Atrato, Brocade, EMC, Facebook, Fujitsu America, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Isilon Systems, LSI, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, Panasas, Quantum Corporation, TATA Consultancy Services, the Samba Team, Unisys, VMware, Wipro Technologies, Xiotech and many others.

It’s always worth reminding you that the SDC presentations are usually delivered to developers by the actual product development teams and frequently the actual developer of the technology is either delivering the presentation or is in the room to take questions. That kind of deep insight is not common in every conference out there.

Microsoft presentations this year include:

Registration is open at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2010/registration and you should definitely plan to attend. If you are registered, leave a comment and let’s plan to meet when we get there!

If you’re following me on Twitter, you probably noticed I am attending SNIA’s Software Developer’s Conference 2010 (SDC 2010) and the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 PlugFest this week.
The agenda for the event is published at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2010/agenda2010.
Here are some random notes from the event, some of them taken from a few earlier tweets (some sessions are just mentioned, others have a few notes).
I’ll keep updating today and tomorrow.

PlugFest

• 25 companies attending the PlugFest
• The place was busy starting on Sunday, 09/19
• Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 “Birds of a Feather” session today at 7:30 PM, after the PlugFest Open House
• File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) “Birds of a Feather” session today at 8:30 PM

Session: "The Long and Winding Road to SMB/CIFS specs" by Christopher Hertel and Jose Rivera (both from ubiqx)

• Christopher on CIFS: "CIFS is dead. Actually, CIFS is undead. Also, CIFS is documented."
• See [MS-CIFS] at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee442092(PROT.10).aspx
• Christopher on SMB: "SMB=Server Message Block, Super Mario Brothers or Small and Medium Business" :-)
• See [MS-SMB] at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc246231(PROT.13).aspx
• Christopher: "The old SMB/CIFS (pre-SMB2) is like the Winchester House, full of strange stairs, rooms and windows"
• Christopher on SMB2: "If you are a CIFS/SMB implementer and you are not working on SMB2, you are behind and you need to run to catch up."
• See [MS-SMB2] at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc246482(PROT.13).aspx
• Christopher: "BranchCache is also documented and it further enhances WAN performance."
• Jose: "One good way to get started is the Implementing CIFS book. It's available online." http://ubiqx.org/cifs/Book.html
• Jose: "Free test suites: FSCT from Microsoft and smbtorture from Samba Team."
• Jose: "Unix Extensions for SMB2" http://www.unixsmb2.org/

Session: "MS-FSA: Describing wire visible behavior of MS File Systems" by Neal Christiansen, Microsoft

• [MS-FSA] documents algorithms that would otherwise have to be described in many other documents like CIFS, SMB, SMB2
• Available for download from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff469524(PROT.10).aspx
• [MS-FSSC] (File System Control Codes) is an important support document for MS-FSA and other documents
• Available for download from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc231987(PROT.13).aspx
• Going over a few of the algoriths described in [MS-FSA]
• Name tunneling: preserves attributes of the file in certain situations (from 8.3 name transition)
• Alternate Data Stream: Some interesting behaviors. For instance, by default, an empty primary DS is created
• Byte range locks. Interesting concept of zero length ranges. FSBO also has some more info on those
• USN journal or change journal. Describes the location points where the journal is updated
• Directory change notification. You can see the many trigger points, what flags are set
• Oplocks. How they are granted and how the different types interact. FSBO also has some nice tables on this
• Deleting files. Interesting details on delete-on-close and delete-pending states
• Valid Data Length (VDL). Allows setting file size without writing zeroes to newly allocated space
• Object GUID. File can be opened by ObjectID. Requirements for setting, retrieving
• Extended Attributes (EA). Name value/pairs to storage metadata associated with a file
• Reparse Points: An open can be redirected. Used by symbolic links. Mutually exclusive with EAs
• Symbolic Links and Mount Points. Implemented as reparse points

Session: “Challenges of 10 Gb iSCSI/FCOE Array Certification” by Mahmoud Jibbe, LSI

Session: “Comparison btw Samba 3 and Likewise Lwiod SMB FileServers” by Steven Danneman, Isilon

Session: “Status of Clustered CIFS Using Samba” by Volker Lendecke, Samba Team / SerNet

Session: “Implementing SMB2 within Samba” by Jeremy Allison, Google

Session: “SMB2 Meeting Linux” by Steve French, IBM

Session: Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 BoF session

• Covered the main differences between Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2
  • Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3
  • Single Instance Storage (SIS)
  • Browser-based Remote Management using RDP
  • OOBE (Out-of-the-box Experience), including two-node cluster OOBE
• Highlights of the main improvements in the Storage Server Components
• For a recent webcast on WSS 2008 R2, check on http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/WSV323

File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) BoF session today at 8:30 PM

• Overview of the tool itself, how it works, how to set it up
• Check http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2009/09/16/file-server-capacity-tool-fsct-1-0-available-for-download.aspx
• Also reviewed FSCT sample results from Scott’s presentation at http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/te/NorthAmerica/2010/pptx/WSV323.pptx

Session: Welcome Remarks by Wayne Adams (SNIA Board Chairman) and Mark Carlson (SDC Committee Chairman)

• SNIA CloudBurst Summit will be broadcast live on Thursday. http://www.snia.org/cloud/Cloudburst/
• SNIA also growing in Brazil. If you speak Portuguese, check http://www.snia.com.br/

Session: Clouds, Convergence and Consolidation by Henry Baltazar, The 451 Group. http://www.the451group.com/

• Where is the innovation? Cloud Storage Service, Hybrid Cloud Storage (on premises cloud gateway appliance)
• Hybrid Cloud Storage Examples: Bottomless NAS Gateway, Disaster Recovery Appliance, Primary Storage Replacement
• Convergence of Storage/Server/Network into super silos.
• FCoE right now only in limited use cases: Server to SAN connectivity "top-of-rack", Storage target conectivity.
• Solid State Storage - the driver is to close the Storage Performance "gap". Spinning drives not improving fast enough.
• SSD: Is MLC the key? Overcoming write endurance limitations. 3x more affordable than SLC. Enterprise ready?
• Where to deploy SSD? Server (PCI-E cards), Storage (embedded in the array), Network (bump in the wire cache)
• Storage vendors are now using more powerful CPUs and running apps on the storage systems themselves

Session: Long Term Information Retention by Sam Fineberg, HP

• If we want to keep data for 50 or 100 years we are talking going beyond the life span of any storage technology
• Disaster, human error, attacks, economic/organizational faults, media/hardware/software/format obsolescence, losing context
• A good archive is always in motion. You can't stuck a tape in a vault and expect to read it in 50 years.
• What's important in a book? The words in it, the paper it's made of, the political context of when it was written?
• Storage formats. We can't predice the future. Key properties: Self contained, Self describing, Extensible.
• SNIA's SIRF (Self Contained Information Retention Format) and Preservations Objects. http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/Fineberg-Cohen_LTRFormat.pdf

Session: Solid State Storage Panel Discussion: “Is Solid State Storage Ready for Primetime?”
Tom Coughlin (Moderator), Coughlin Associates; Marty Czekalski, Seagate; Jim Handy, Objective Analysis; Dr. Easen Ho, Calypso Systems, Inc; Esther Spangler, Smart Modular

• Tom Coughlin
  • Looking at cost trends for flash memory and hard disk drives.
  • Historic symbiotic relationship between flash and HDDs in consumer devices
  • Symbiotic combination of Flash memory and HDDs in computers
  • Calypso SSD Blind Survey 2010. Comparing SLC, MLC and HDD. http://calypsotesters.com/testing.html
  • Flash Use: consumer applications, USB sticks. LA new cache layer? Use some flash or more DRAM for caching?
  • Hetzler’s Chasm Cache Analysis (S. Hetzler, IBM). Two chasms: DRAM-SATA, SATA-Tape. http://www.caiss.org/docs/DinnerSeminar/TheStorageChasm20090205.pdf
  • Dual drive (tiering on your computer – Marvell, Hitachi, Toshiba) and hyrid HDD (Seagate) approaches
  • Dual drive: How much SDD do you need to storage your applications? 40GB is enough. User data goes to a HDD.
  • Hybrid drives, totally transparent to the OS. Putting items you access more often on the SSD. Boot gets faster multiple reboots.
  • Options: Flash Cache Module, Solid State Drive, Solid State Hybrid Drive.
  • Hytachi-LG HyDrive – Optical disk with flash memory drive for dual storage laptops. http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/31/hitachi-lg-goes-official-with-hydrive-ssd-equipped-optical-driv/
  • HDD: Latency issues. Uses DRAM or flash memory for cache? Intel likes flash and hard drives. Seagate likes hybrid drives.
• Jim Handy
  • The DRAM/HDD Speed Gap chart: Tape, HDD, DRAM, L3, L2, L1 – Price per GB vs. Bandwidth in MBps (logarithmic scale)
  • Options: Keep more data in DRAM (more RAM, more servers) or use accelerated HDDs to fill the gap ($300, short-stroked)
  • In 2004 NAND shot past DRAM’s price per GB. 1/12th the cost now and growing. NAND is slower/cheaper than DRAM and faster than a HDD.
  • Yesterday, Violin announced a 40TB SSD. “Put the whole database into flash!” $16 per GB and $3 per IOPS. http://www.violin-memory.com/news/press-releases/violin-memory-quadruples-data-center-density-with-40tb-capacity-flash-memory-array/
  • Automatic Tier Management: autonomous (controllers) or operating system support. Many more to come!
  • Performance muse be understood. Performance is not always intuitive
  • PC: 1 HDD, no hierarchy, speed is nice to have. Data Center: thousands of HDD, storage hierarchy, speed is money
  • PC architectures will follow the data center example. Main storage cached by flash. It’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when.
• Panel discussion

Session: Interoperability Tools for CIFS/SMB/SMB2 by Paul Long and Simon Sun, Microsoft

• [MS-FSSO] is great place for an overview of file-related protocols. Great place to start.
• You can also use the MSDN support forums
• Network Monitor
  • Parsers updated monthly. You can modify/add parsers.
  • Conversation tree is nice.
  • Rich filtering and colorization of frames.
  • Frame annotations
• Network monitor. Four sources of captures
  • GUI Capture from NDIS capture driver
  • NMcap / command line tool to enable/disable capture from a batch file
  • Pcap file format – import captures from other tools like tcpdump, wireshark
  • Event Tracing for Windows. Using netsh trace, logman. Can capture during reboot.
• Netmon API. Can be used for capture or parsing (what is the SMB command in this frame?)
• Experts / Top users / Top protocols / SSL decrypt / ...
• Interoperability Test Suite
• Captures to help you understand with annotations, reference to doc pointer - http://sysdoccap.codeplex.com 
• Look for the file sharing system docs
• Why reviewing packets against the protocol specification if netmon can do the first pass for you?
• Parsers error will point to frames with issues. Also look at SMBerrors
• There cloud be errors in the parsers, but most of the time…
• Can also help you locate the protocol document doc based on a trace. Option to Go to data type definition
• Spec explorer: Use a model to create tests: start with spec, create implementation from spec, write tests to check conformance
• Model used to generate tests – provide input and check expected output
• Hand create model, not test: Spec explorer handles model/input/output
• Interop test suite:
  • Validate protocol doc aginst windows implementation. Verify conformance/accuracy/usability of protocol doc
  • Interop test: see http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/appliedinterop
• Netmon vs wireshark
  • Netmon: parsers are very complete, focus on applications, can capture multiple NICs
  • Wireshark: more feature rich in general,  more focused on lower layers
• Interop test suite: Intent to release source code in a VHD in the future. No specific timeline yet. Working on it.

Session: SMB Traffic Analyzer - Monitor the Data Flow of Samba Servers, Holger Hetterich, Novell

Session: Evaluating SMB2 Performance for Home Directory Workloads by David Kruse and Dan Lovinger, Microsoft

• Options: Performance counters, network captures, windows perform ance analysis tool
• Answering deeper questions. Am I storage, network or CPU bound? Am I seeing a high level of lock contention?
• Event-based model – Log Request, Gather execution info, Log Response + Execution Info
• Execution slicing
• Data mining
• Analyzing an FSCT run to look at local handle count across time, seconds per operation for each type of request
• Evaluating the HomeFolders workload of the File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT)
• Describing FSCT. Overview of the tool, history of its development, details about how it simulates a workload.
• Homefolders: User follows a frequency distribution of scenarios, with ~1 scenario every 11 seconds.
• Capacity metric: How many users the server can satisfy without overload (delayed scenarios)
• Initial Physical Model: Client (SMB RDR), SMB Server, Storage Stack, Disk Subsystem. Track what happens at each level.
• Model with compounding: 1 packet with multiple operations. Latency equation taken that into consideration
• Measuring HomeFolders: SMB 2.1 total wire operations per FSCT scenario.
• SMB Investigation: Modeling of Directory Cache Improvements vs. Directory Leases. Second one seems much better.
• Latency Estimates;
  • Use the model to extrapolate to real hardware.
  • FSCT used to load low-end reference server, captured counters at near overload.
  • High Variance. Some large tails on the CREATE operation
• Scaled scenarios. Extrapolate from LAN to WAN by adding 2-20ms client-server network latency
• These are purely investigations, but shows how a performance model like this can be useful.
  • Consider performance counters and events in your design process
  • New protocols are opportunities to revisit your performance infrastructure
  • More data = More insight = Better designs, earlier
  • Extrapolation models can be an interesting input to the design process

Session: Scaling Likewise-CIFS Beyond 50k Concurrent Connections on a Single Node, by Gerald Carter, Likewise Software

• Likewise as defined by Gerald: “Interoperability platform for non-Microsoft clients and servers in Microsoft OS dominated networks.” http://www.likewiseopen.org
• Gerald quotes on performance:

• “No one cares about performance until it’s not there.”
• “Workloads, much like people, are rarely objective.”

If you are registered for the event, get the decks from http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2010/presentation

For everyone else, the decks are typically made available to the public a few months after the event. I’ll make sure to blog about it when it happens.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) hosted the 8th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) earlier this year. As usual, Microsoft was the underwriter of the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 PlugFest, which was co-located with the SDC event.

For developers working with storage-related technologies, this event gathers a unique crowd and includes a rich agenda. Key industry players were represented and offered presentations. It’s always worth reminding you that the SDC presentations were usually delivered to developers by the actual product development teams and frequently the actual developer of the technology either delivered the presentation or was in the room to take questions. That kind of deep insight is not common in every conference out there.

Microsoft presentations this year included:

SNIA has now released the content publicly, including video recordings for many of the talks. Check these and other presentations (all with slides and many with video recordings) at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2011/2011presentations

If you like the content, be sure to mark your calendars for next year’s SDC 2012. It’s always a great event and the details are already out at http://www.snia.org/about/calendar/2012-storage-developer-conference

The Microsoft TechEd 2012 North America conference is happening this week in Orlando, FL. As part of that event, a number of partners are showing their hardware and/or software at the exhibit area called the TechExpo.

I have spent some time there and took a few pictures of a few partners that have solutions related to the File Server or SMB 3.0 (storage, networking, servers). I tried to capture the signage on each booth, but you need to click on each picture to see a larger version of it.

Chelsio www.chelsio.com
DataOn www.dataonstorage.com
EMC www.emc.com
Fujitsu www.fujitsu.com
Hitachi www.hds.com
HP www.hp.com
IBM www.ibm.com
Intel www.intel.com
LSI www.lsi.com
Mellanox www.mellanox.com
NetApp www.netapp.com
Quanta www.quantaqct.com
RAID Inc. www.raidinc.com
Violin Memory www.violin-memory.com
X-IO www.x-io.com

A big THANKS to each and every one of them for their hard work with Windows Server 2012. There are more partners at the expo, but I did not have time to visit them all. Sorry if I missed your booth.

If you're attending the event, a reminder that the TechExpo will be open tomorrow from 10:30 AM to 2:00 PM.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 9th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 17th. As usual, Microsoft is underwriting the SMB/SMB2/SMB3 Plugfest, which is co-located with the SDC event.

For developers working with storage-related technologies, this event gathers a unique crowd and includes a rich agenda that you can find at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2012/agenda2012.  All the key industry players are represented. It lists presentations from Arista, Cleversafe, Dell, EMC, Fusion-io, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Micron, Microsoft, NEC, NetApp, Oracle, Pure Storage, Red Hat, Samba Team, Seagate, Spectra Logic, SwiftTest, Tata, Wipro and many others.

It’s always worth reminding you that the SDC presentations are usually delivered to developers by the actual product development teams and frequently the actual developer of the technology is either delivering the presentation or is in the room to take questions. That kind of deep insight is not common in every conference out there.

Presentations by Microsoft this year include:

Registration is open at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2012/registration and you should definitely plan to attend. If you are registered, leave a comment and let’s plan to meet when we get there!

Here is a compilation of my live tweets from SNIA’s SDC 2012 (Storage Developers Conference).
You can also read those directly from twitter at http://twitter.com/josebarreto (in reverse order)

Notes and disclaimers

• These tweets were typed during the talks and they include typos and my own misinterpretations.
• Text under each talk are quotes from the speaker or text from the speaker slides, not my personal opinion.
• If you feel that I misquoted you or badly represented the content of a talk, please add a comment to the post.
• I spent just limited time fixing typos or correcting the text after the event. Just so many hours in a day...
• I have not attended all sessions (since there are 4 or 5 at a time, that would actually not be possible :-)…
• SNIA usually posts the actual PDF decks a few weeks after the event. Attendees have access immediately.

Linux CIFS/SMB2 Kernel Clients - A Year In Review by Steven French, IBM

• SMB3 will be important for Linux, not just Windows #sdc2012
• Linux kernel supports SMB. Kernel 3.7 (Q4-2012) includes 71 changes related to SMB (including SMB 2.1), 3.6 has 61, 3.5 has 42
• SMB 2.1 kernel code in Linux enabled as experimental in 3.7. SMB 2.1 will replace CIFS as the default client when stable.
• SMB3 client (CONFIG_EXPERIMENTAL) expected by Linux kernel 3.8.
• While implementing Linux client for SMB3, focusing on strengths: clustering, RDMA. Take advantage of great protocol docs

Multiuser CIFS Mounts, Jeff Layton, Red Hat

• I attended this session, but tweeted just the session title.

How Many IOPS is Enough by Thomas Coughlin, Coughlin Associates

• 79% of surveyed people said they need between 1K and 1M IOPs. Capacity: from 1GB to 50TB with sweet spot on 500GB.
• 78% of surveyed people said hardware delivers between 1K and 1M IOPs, with a sweet spot at 100K IOPs. Matches requirements  
• Minimum latency system hardware (before other bottleneck) ranges between >1sec to <10ns. 35% at 10ms latency.
• $/GB for SDD and HDD both declining in parallel paths. $/GB roughly follows IOPs.
• Survey results will be available in October...

SMB 3.0 ( Because 3 > 2 ) - David Kruse, Microsoft

• Fully packed room to hear David's SMB3 talk. Plus a few standing in the back... pic.twitter.com/TT5mRXiT
• Time to ponder: When should we recommend disabling SMB1/CIFS by default?

Understanding Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 Through Specific Test Cases with Jose Barreto

• No tweets during this session. Hard to talk and tweet at the same time :-)

Continuously Available SMB – Observations and Lessons Learned - David Kruse and Mathew George.

• I attended this session, but tweeted just the session title.

Status of SMB2/SMB3 Development in Samba, Michael Adam, Samba Team

• SMB 2.0 officially supported in Samba 3.6 (about a year ago, August 2011)
• SMB 2.1 work done in Samba for Large MTU, multi-credit, dynamic re-authentication
• Samba 4.0 will be the release to incorporate SMB 3.0 (encryption and secure negotiate already done)

The Solid State Storage (R-)Evolution, Michael Krause, Hewlett-Packard

• Storage (especially SSD) performance constrained by SAS interconnects
• Looking at serviceability from DIMM to PCIe to SATA to SAS. Easy to replace x perfor
• No need to re-invent SCSI. All OS, hypervisors, file systems, PCIe storage support SCSI.
• Talking SCSI Express. Potential to take advantage of PCIe capabilities.
• PCIe has benefits but some challenges: Non optimal DMA "caching", non optimal MMIO performance
• everything in the world of storage is about to radically change in a few years: SATA, SAS, PCIe, Memory
• Downstream Port Containment. OS informed of async communications lost.
• OCuLink: new PCIe cable technology
• Hardware revolution: stacked media, MCM / On-die, DIMM. Main memory in 1 to 10 TB. Everything in memory?
• Express Bay (SFF 8639 connector), PCIe CEM (MMIO based semantics), yet to be developed modules
• Media is going to change. $/bit, power, durability, performance vs. persistence. NAND future bleak.
• Will every memory become persistent memory? Not sic-fi, this could happen in a few years...
• Revolutionary changes coming in media. New protocols, new hardware, new software. This is only the beginning

Block Storage and Fabric Management Using System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager and SMI-S, Madhu Jujare, Microsoft

• Windows Server 2012 Storage Management APIs are used by VMM 5012. An abstraction of SMI-S APIs.
• SMAPI Operations: Discovery, Provisioning, Replication, Monitoring, Pass-thru layer
• Demo of storage discovery and mapping with Virtual Machine Manager 2012.SP1. Using Microsoft iSCSI Target!

Linux Filesystems: Details on Recent Developments in Linux Filesystems and Storage by Chris Mason, Fusion-io

• Many journaled file systems introduced in Linux 2.4.x in the early 2000s.
• Linux 2.6.x. Source control at last. Kernel development moved more rapidly. Specially after Git.
• Backporting to Enterprise. Enterprise kernels are 2-3 years behind mainline. Some distros more than others.
• Why are there so many filesystems? Why not pick one? Because it's easy and people need specific things.
• Where Linux is now. Ext4, XFS (great for large files). Btrfs (snapshots, online maintenance). Device Mapper.
• Where Linux is now. CF (Compact Flash). Block. SCSI (4K, unmap, trim, t10 pi, multipath, Cgroups).
• NFS. Still THE filesystem for Linux. Revisions introduce new features and complexity. Interoperable.
• Futures. Atomic writes. Copy offload (block range cloning or new token based standard). Shingled drives (hybrid)
• Futures. Hinting (tiers, connect blocks, IO priorities). Flash (seems appropriate to end here :-)

Non-volatile Memory in the Storage Hierarchy: Opportunities and Challenges by Dhruva Chakrabarti, HP

• Will cover a few technologies coming the near future. From disks to flash and beyond...
• Flash is a huge leap, but NVRAM presents even bigger opportunities.
• Comparing density/retention/endurance/latency/cost for hdd/sdd (nand flash)/dram/nvram
• Talking SCM (Storage Class Memory). Access choices: block interface or byte-addressable model.
• Architectural model for NVRAM. Coexist with DRAM. Buffers/caches still there. Updates may linger...
• Failure models. Fail-stop. Byzantine. Arbitrary state corruption. Memory protection.
• Store to memory must be failure-atomic.
• NVRAM challenges. Keep persistent data consistent. Programming complexity. Models require flexibility.
• Visibility ordering requirements. Crash can lead to pointers to uninitialized memory, wild pointers.
• Potential inconsistencies like persistent memory leaks. There are analogs in multi-threading.
• Insert a cache line flush to ensure visibility in NVRAM. Reminiscent of a disk cache flush.
• Many flavors of cache flushes. Intended semantics must be honored red. CPU instruction or API?
• Fence-based programming has not been well accepted. Higher level abstractions? Wrap in transactions?
• Conclusion. What is the right API for persistent memory? How much effort? What's the implementation cost?

Building Next Generation Cloud Networks for Big Data Applications by Jayshree Ullal, Arista Networks

• Agenda: Big Data Trends, Data Analytics, Hadoop.
• 64-bit CPUs trends, Data storage trends. Moore's law is alive and well.
• Memory hierarchy is not changing. Hard drives not keeping up, but Flash...
• Moore's law for Big Data, Digital data doubling every 2 years. DAS/NAS/SAN not keeping up.
• Variety of data. Raw, unstructured. Not enough minds around to deal with all the issues here.
• Hadoop means the return of DAS. Racks of servers, DAS, flash cache, non-blocking fabric.
• Hadoop. 3 copies of the data, one in another rack. Protect you main node, single point of failure.
• Hadoop. Minimum 10Gb. Shift from north-south communications to east-west. Servers talking to each other.
• From mainframe, to client/server, to Hadoop clusters.
• Hadoop pitfalls. Not a layer 2 thing. Highly redundant, many paths, routing. Rack locality. Data integrity
• Hadoop. File transfers in chunks and blocks. Pipelines replication east-west. Map and Reduce.
• showing sample 2-rack solution. East-west interconnect is very important. Non-blocking. Buffering.
• Sample conf. 4000 nodes. 48 servers per cabinet. High speed network backbone. Fault tolerant main node
• Automating cluster provisioning. Script using DHCP for zero touch provisioning.
• Buffer challenges. Dynamic allocations, survive micro bursts.
• Advanced diagnostics and management. Visibility to the queue depth and buffering. Graph historical latency.
• my power is running out. I gotta speak fast. :-)

Windows File and Storage Directions by Surendra Verma, Microsoft

• Landscape: pooled resources, self-service, elasticity, virtualization, usage-based, highly available
• Industry-standard parts to build very high scale, performing systems. Greater number of less reliable parts.
• Services influencing hardware. New technologies to address specific needs. Example: Hadoop.
• OS storage built to address specific needs. Changing that requires significant effort.
• You have to assume that disks and other parts will fail. Need to address that in software.
• If you have 1000 disks in a system, some are always failing, you're always reconstructing.
• ReFS: new file system in Windows 8, assumes that everything is unreliable underneath.
• Other relevant features in Windows Server 2012: Storage Spaces, Clustered Shared Volumes, SMB Direct.
• Storage Spaces provides resiliency to media failures. Mirror (2 or 3 way), parity, hot spares.
• Shared Storage Spaces. Resiliency to node and path failures using shared SAS disks.
• Storage Spaces is aware of enclosures, can tolerate failure of an entire enclosure.
• ReFS provides resiliency to media failures. Never write metadata in place. Integrity streams checksum.
• integrity Streams. User data checksum, validated on every read. Uses Storage Spaces to find a good copy.
• You own application can use an API to talk to Storage Spaces, find all copies of the data, correct things.
• Resiliency to latent media errors. Proactively detect and correct, keeping redundancy levels intact.
• ReFS can detect/correct corrupted data even for data not frequently read. Do it on a regular basis.
• What if all copies are lost? ReFS will keep the volume online, you can still read what's not corrupted.
• example configuration with 4 Windows Server 2012 nodes connected to multiple JBODs.

Hyper-V Storage Performance and Scaling with Joe Dai & Liang Yang, Microsoft

Joe Dai:

• New option in Windows Server 2012: Virtual Fibre Channel. FC to the guest. Uses NPIV. Live migration just works.
• New in WS2012: SMB 3.0 support in Hyper-V. Enables Shared Nothing Live Migration, Cross-cluster Live Migration.
• New in WS 2012: Storage Spaces. Pools, Spaces. Thin provisioning. Resiliency.
• Clustered PCI RAID. Host hardware RAID in a cluster setup.
• Improved VHD format used by Hyper-V. VHDX. Format specification at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29681 Currently v0.95. 1.0 soon
• VHDX: Up to 64TB. Internal log for resiliency. MB aligned. Larger blocks for better perf. Custom metadata support.
• Comparing performance. Pass thru, fixed, dynamic, differencing. VHDX dynamic ~= VHD fixed ~= physical disk.
• Offloaded Data Transfers (ODX). Reduces times to merge, mirror and create VHD/VHDX. Also works for IO inside the VM.
• Hyper-V support for UNMAP. Supported on VHDX, Pass-thru. Supported on VHDX Virtual SCSI, Virtual FC, Virtual IDE.
• UNMAP in Windows Server 2012 can flow from virtual IDE in VM to VHDX to SMB share to block storage behind share.

Laing Yang:

• My job is to find storage bottlenecks in Hyper-V storage and hand over to Joe to fix them. :-)
• Finding scale limits in Hyper-V synthetic SCSI IO path in WS2008R2. 1 VSP thread, 1 VMBus channel per VM, 256 queue depth per
• WS2012: From 4 VPs per VM to 64 VP per VM. Multi-threaded IO model. 1 channel per 16 VPs. Breaks 1 million IOPs.
• Huge performance jump in WS2012 Hyper-V. Really close to physical even with high performance storage.
• Hyper-V Multichannel (not to be confused with SMB Multichannel) enables the jump on performance.
• Built 1 million IOPs setup for about $10K (excluding server) using SSDs. Demo using IOmeter. Over 1.22M IOPs...

The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Storage Behaviors and Requirements with Spencer Shepler, Microsoft

• Storage for Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012: VHDX, NTFS, CSV, SMB 3.0.
• Review of SMB 3.0 advantages for Hyper-V: active recovery, Multichannel, RDMA.
• Showing results for SMB Multichannel with four traditional 10GbE. Line rate with 64KB IOs. CPU bound with 8KB.
• Files used by Hyper-V. XML, BIN, CSV, VHD, VHDX, AVHDX. Gold, diff and snapshot disk relationships.
• improvements in VHDX. Up to 64TB size. 4KB logical sector size, 1MB alignment for allocations. UNMAP. TRIM.
• VDI: Personal desktops vs. Pooled desktops. Pros and cons.
• Test environment. WS2012 servers. Win7 desktops. Login VSI http://www.loginvsi.com - 48 10K rpm HDD.
• Workload. Copy, word, print pdf, find/replace, zip, outlook e-mail, ppt, browsing, freemind. Realistic!
• Login VSI fairly complex to setup. Login frequency 30 seconds. Workload started "randomly" after login.
• Example output from Login VSI. Showing VSI Max.
• Reading of BIN file during VM restore is sequential. IO size varies.
• Gold VHDX activity. 77GB over 1 hour. Only reads, 512 bytes to 1MB size IOs. 25KB average. 88% are <=32KB
• Distribution for all IO. Reads are 90% 64KB or less. Writes mostly 20KB or less.
• AVHD activity 1/10 read to write ratio. Flush/write is 1/10. Range 512 bytes to 1MB. 90% are 64KB or less.
• At the end of test run for 1 hour with 85 desktops. 2000 IOPs from all 85 VMs, 2:1 read/write ratio.

SQL Server: Understanding the Data Workload by Gunter Zink, Microsoft (original title did not fit a tweet)

• Looking at OLTP and data warehousing workloads. What's new in SQL Server 2012.
• Understanding SQL Server. Store and retrieve structured data, Relation, ACID, using schema.
• Data organized in tables. tables have columns. Tables stored in 8KB pages. Page size fixed, not configurable.
• SQL Server Datafile. Header, GAM page (bitmap for 4GB of pages), 4GB of pages, GAM page, 4GB of pages, etc...
• SQL Server file space allocated in extents. An extent is 8 pages or 64KB. Parameter for larger extent size.
• SQL Server log file: Hreader, log records (512 bytes to 60KB). Checkpoint markers. truncated after backup.
• If your storage reports 4KB sector size, minimum log write for SQL Server is 4KB. Records are padded.
• 2/3 of SQL Servers run OLTP workloads. Many active users, lightweight transactions.
• Going over what happens when you run OLTP. Read cache or read disk, write log to disk and mark page as dirty
• Log buffer. Circular buffer, no fixed size. One buffer written to disk, another being filled with changes.
• If storage is not fast enough, writing log takes longer and buffer changes grows larger.
• Lazy writer. Writes dirty pages to disk (memory pressure). Checkpoint: Writes pages, marks log file (time limit)
• Checkpoint modes: Automatic, Indirect, Manual. Write rate reduced if latency reaches 20ms (can be configured)
• Automatic SQL Checkpoint. Write intensity controlled by recovery interval. Default is 0 = every two minutes.
• New in SQL Server 2012. Target_Recovery_Time. Makes checkpoint less spikey by constantly writing dirty pages.
• SQL Server log file. Change records in sequence. Mostly just writes. Except in recovery or transaction rollback.
• Data file IO. 8KB random reads, buffered (based on number of user queries). Can be done in 64KB at SQL start up.
• Log file IO: unbuffered small sequential writes (depends on how many inserts/updates/deletes).
• About 80% of SQL Server performance problems are storage performance problems. Not enough spindles or memory.
• SQL Server problems. 20ms threshold too high for SSDs. Use -k parameter to limit (specified in MB/sec)
• Issues. Checkpoint floods array cache (20ms). Cache de-staging causes log drive write performance.
• Log writes must go to disk, no buffering. Data writes can be buffered, since it can recover from the log.
• SQL Server and Tiered Storage. We probably won't read what we've just written.
• Data warehouse. Read large amounts of data, mostly no index, table scans. Hourly or daily updates (from OLTP).
• Understanding a data warehouse query. Lots of large reads. Table scans and range scans. Reads: 64KB up to 512KB.
• DW. Uses TempDB to handle intermediate results, sort. Mostly 64KB writes, 8KB reads. SSDs are good for this.
• DW common problems: Not enough IO bandwidth. 2P server can ingest 10Gbytes/sec. Careful with TP, pooled LUNs.
• DW common problems. Arrays don't read from multiple mirror copies.
• SMB file server and SQL Server. Limited support in SQL Server 2008 R2. Fully supported with SQL Server 2012.
• I got my fastest data warehouse performance using SMB 3.0 with RDMA. Also simpler to manage.
• Comparing steps to update SQL Server with Fibre Channel and SMB 3.0 (many more steps using FC).
• SQL Server - FC vs. SMB 3.0 connectivity cost comparison. Comparing $/MB/sec with 1GbE, 10GbE, QDR IB, 8G FC.

The Future of Protocol and SMB2/3 Analysis with Paul Long, Microsoft

• We'll talk about Message Analyzer. David is helping.
• Protocol Engineering Framework
• Like Network Monitor. Modern message analysis tool built on the Protocol Engineering Framework
• Source for Message Analyzer can be network packets, ETW events, text logs, other sources. Can validate messages.
• Browse for message sources, Select a subset of messages, View using a viewer like a grid..
• New way of viewing starting from the top down, instead of the bottom up in NetMon.
• Unlike NetMon, you can group by any field or message property. Also payload rendering (like JPG)
• Switching to demo mode...
• Guidance shipped online. Starting with a the "Capture/Trace" option.
• Trace scenarios: NDIS, Firewall, Web Proxy, LAN , WLAN, Wifi. Trace filter as well.
• Doing a link layer capture (just like old NetMon). Start capture. Generate some web traffic.
• Stop the trace. Group by module. Look at all protocols. Like HTTP. Drill in to see operations.
• Looking at operations. HTTP GET. Look at the details. High level stack view.
• Now grouping on both protocol and content type. Easily spots pictures over HTTP. Image preview.
• Easier to see time elapsed per operation when you group messages. You dig to individual messages
• Now looking at SMB trace. Trace of a file copy. Group on the file name (search for the property)
• Now grouped on SMB.Filename. You can see all SB operations to copy a specific file.
• Now looking at a trace of SMB file copy to an encrypted file share.
• Built in traces to capture from the client side or server side. Can do full PDU or header.only
• This can also be used to capture SMB Direct data, using the SMB client trace.
• Showing the trace now with both network traffic and SMB client trace data (unencrypted).
• Want to associate the wire capture with the SMB client ETW trace? Use the message ID
• Showing mix of firewall trace and SMB client ETW trace. You see it both encrypted and not.
• SMB team at Microsoft is the first to add native protocol unit tracing. Very useful...
• Most providers have ETW debug logging but not the actual messages.
• You can also get the trace with just NetSh or LogMan and load the trace in the tool later.
• We also can deploy the tool and use PowerShell to start/stop capture.
• If the event provider offers them, you can specify level and keywords during the capture.
• Add some files (log file and wireshark trace). Narrow down the time. Add selection filter.
• Mixing wireshark trace with a Samba text log file (pattern matching text log).
• Audience: As a Samba hacker, Message Analyzer is one of the most interesting tools I have seen!
• Jaws are dropping as Paul demos analyzing a trace from WireShark + Samba taken on Linux.
• Next demo: visualizations. Two separate file copies. Showing summary view for SMB reads/writes
• Looking at a graph of bytes/second for SMB reads and writes. Zooming into a specific time.
• From any viewer you should be any to do any kind of selection and then launch another viewer.
• If you're a developer, you can create a very sophisticated viewer.
• Next demo: showing the protocol dashboard viewer. Charts with protocol bars. Drills into HTTP.

Storage Systems for Shingled Disks, with Garth Gibson, Panasas

• Talking about disk technology. Reaction of HDD to what's going with SSDs.
• Kryder's law for magnetic disks. Expectation is that disks will cost next to nothing.
• High capacity disk. As bits get smaller, the bit might not hold it's orientation 10 years later.
• Heat assisted to make it possible to write, then keep it longer when cold. Need to aim that laser precisely..
• New technology. Shingled writing. Write head is wider than read head. Density defined by read head, not write head.
• As you write, you overwrite a portion of what you wrote before, but you can still read it.
• Shingled can be done with today's heads with minor changes, no need to wait for heat assisted technology.
• Shingled disks. Large sequential writes. Disks becomes tape!!
• Hard to see just the one bit. Safe plan is to see the bit from slightly different angles and use signal processing.
• if aiming at 3x the density: cross talk. Signal processing using 2 dimensions TMDR. 3-5 revs to to read a track.
• Shingled disks. Initial multiplier will be a factor of 2. Seek 10nm instead of 30 nm. Wider band with sharp edges.
• Write head edge needs to be sharp on one side, where the tracks will overlap. Looking at different widths.
• Aerial density favors large bands that overlap. Looking at some math that proves this.
• You could have a special place in the disk with no shingles for good random write performance, mixed with shingled.
• Lots of question on shingled disks. How to handle performance, errors, etc.
• Shingled disks. Same problem for Flash. Shingled disks - same algorithms as Flash.
• modify software to avoid or minimize read, modify, write. Log structured file systems are 20 years old.
• Key idea is that disk attribute says "sequential writing". T13 and t10 standards.
• Shingled disks. Hadoop as initial target. Project with mix of shingled and unshingled disks. Could also be SSD+HDD.
• Prototype banded disk API. Write forward or move back to 0. Showing test results with new file system.
• future work. Move beyond hadoop to general workloads, hurts with lots of small files. Large files ok.
• future work. Pack metadata. All of the metadata into tables, backed on disk by large blob of changes.
• Summary of status. Appropriate for Big Data. One file = one band. Hadoop is write once. Next steps: pack metadata.

The Big Deal of Big Data to Big Storage with Benjamin Woo, Neuralytix

• Can't project to both screens because laptop does not have VGA. Ah, technology... Will use just right screen.
• Even Batman is into big data. ?!
• What's the big picture for big data. Eye chart with lots of companies, grouped into areas...
• We have a problem with storage/data processing today. Way too many hops. (comparing to airline routes ?!)
• Sample path: Oracle to Informatica to Microstategy and Hadoop. Bring them together. Single copy of "the truth".
• Eliminate the process of ETL. Eliminate the need for exports. Help customers to find stuff in the single copy.
• You are developers. You need to find a solution for this problem. Do you buy into this?
• Multiple copies OK for redundancy or performance, but shouldn't it all be same source of truth?
• Single copy of the truth better for discovery. Don't sample, don't summarize. You will find more than you expect.
• We're always thinking about the infrastructure. Remove yourself from the hardware and think about the data!
• The challenge is how to think about the data. Storage developers can map that to the hardware.
• Send complaints to /dev/null. Tweet at @BenWooNY
• Should we drop RDBMS altogether? Should we add more metadata to them? Maybe.
• Our abstractions are already far removed from the hardware. Think virtual disks in VM to file system to SAN array.
• Software Defined Storage is something we've been doing for years in silicon.
• Remember what we're here for. It's about the data. Otherwise there is no point in doing storage.
• Is there more complexity in having a single copy of the truth? Yes, but that is part of what we do! We thrive there!
• Think about Hadoop. They take on all the complexity and use dumb hardware. That's how they create value!

Unified Storage for the Private Cloud with Dennis Chapman, NetApp

• 10th anniversary of SMI-S. Also 10th anniversary of pirate day. Arghhh...
• application silos to virtualization to private clouds (plus public and hybrid clouds)
• Focusing on the network. Fundamentally clients talking to storage in some way...
• storage choices for physical servers. Local (DAS) and remote (FC, iSCSI, SMB). Local for OS, remote for data.
• Linux pretty much the same as Windows. Difference is NFS instead of SMB. Talking storage affinities.
• Windows OS. Limited booting from iSCSI and FC. Mostly local.
• Windows. Data mostly on FC and iSCSI, SMB still limited (NFS more well established on Linux).
• shifting to virtualized workloads on Windows. Opts for local and remote. More choices, storage to the guest.
• Virtualized workloads are the #1 configuration we provide storage for.
• Looking at options for Windows and Linux guests, hosted on both VMware and Hyper-V hosts. Table shows options
• FC to the guest. Primary on Linux, secondary on Windows. Jose: FC to the guest new in WS2012.
• File storage (NFS) primary on Linux, but secondary on Windows (SMB). Jose: again, SMB support new in WS2012.
• iSCSI secondary for Linux guest, but primary for Windows guests.
• SMB still limited right now, expect it to grow. Interested on how it will play, maybe as high as NFS on Linux
• Distributed workload state. Workload domain, hypervisors domain, storage domain.
• Guest point in time consistency. Crash consistency or application consistency. OS easier, applications harder
• Hibernation consistency. Put the guest to sleep and snapshot. Works well for Windows VMs. Costs time.
• Application consistency. Specific APIs. VSS for Windows. I love this! Including remote VSS for SMB shares.
• Application consistency for Linux. Missing VSS. We have to do specific things to make it work. Not easy.
• hypervisors PIT consistency. VMware, cluster file system VMFS. Can store files on NFS as well.
• Hypervisors PIT for Hyper-V. Similar choices with VHD on CSV. Also now option for SMB in WS2012.
• Affinities and consistency. Workload domain, Hypervisors domain and Storage domain backups. Choices.
• VSS is the major difference between Windows and Linux in terms of backup and consistency.
• Moving to the Storage domain. Data ONTAP 8 Clustering. Showing 6-node filer cluster diagram.
• NetApp Vservers owns a set of Flexvols, with contain close objects (either LUN or file).
• Sample workflow with NetApp with remote SMB storage. Using remote VSS to create a backup using clones.
• Sample workflow. App consistent backup from a guest using an iSCSI LUN.
• Showing eye charts with integration with VMware and Microsoft.
• Talking up the use of PowerShell, SMB when integrating with Microsoft.
• Talk multiple protocols, rich services, deep management integration, highly available and reliable.

SNIA SSSI PCIe SSD Round Table. Moderator + four members.

• Introductions, overview of SSSI PCIe task force and committee.
• 62 companies in the last conference. Presentations available for download. http://www.snia.org/forums/sssi/pcie
• Covering standards, sites and tools available from the group. See link posted
• difference between PCIE SSDs look just other drives, but there are differences. Bandwidth is one of them.
• Looking at random 4KB write IOPs and response time for different types of disks: HDD, MLC, SLC, PCIe.
• Different SSD tech offer similar response rates. Some high latencies due to garbage collection.
• comparing now DRAM, PCIe, SAS and SATA. Lower latencies in first two.
• Comparing CPU utilization. From less than 10% to over 50%. What CPU utilization to achieve IOPs...
• Other system factors. Looking at CPU affinity effect on random 4KB writes... Wide variation.
• Performance measurement. Response time is key when testing PCIe SSDs. Power mgmt? Heat mgmt? Protocol effect on perf?
• Extending the SCSI platform for performance. SCSI is everywhere in storage.
• Looking at server attached SSDs and how much is SATA, SAS, PCIe, boot drive. Power envelope is a consideration.
• SCSI is everywhere. SCSI Express protocol for standard path to PCIe. SoP (SCSI over PCIe). Hardware and software.
• SCSI Express: Controllers, Drive/Device, Drivers. Express bay connector. 25 watts of power.
• Future: 12Gbps SAS in volume at the end of 2013. Extended copy feature. 25W devices. Atomic writes. Hinting. SCSI Express.
• SAS controllers > 1 million IOPs and increased power for SAS. Reduces PCIe SSD differentiation. New form factors?
• Flash drives: block storage or memory.
• Block versus Memory access. Storage SSDs, PCIe SSDs, memory class SCM compared in a block diagram. Looking at app performance
• optimization required for apps to realize the memory class benefits. Looking at ways to address this.
• Open industry directions. Make all storage look like SCSI or offer apps other access models for storage?
• Mapping NVMExpress capability to SCSI commands. User-level abstractions. Enabling SCM by making it easy.
• Panel done with introductions. Moving to questions.
• How is Linux support for this? NVMExpress driver is all that exists now.
• How much of the latency is owned by the host and the PCIe device? Difficult to answer. Hardware, transport, driver.
• Comparing to DRAM was excellent. That was very helpful.
• How are form factors moving forward? 2.5" HDD format will be around for a long time. Serviceability.
• Memory like access semantics - advantages over SSDs. Lower overhead, lots in the hardware.
• Difference between NVMe and SOP/PQI? Capabilities voted down due to complexity.
• What are the abstractions like? Something like a file? NVMe has a namespace. Atomic write is a good example. How to overlay?
• It's easy to use just a malloc, but it's a cut the block, run with memory. However, how do you transition?

NAS Management using System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager and SMI-S with Alex Naparu and Madhu Jujare

• VMM for Management of Virtualized Infrastructure: VMM 2012 SP1 covers block storage and SMB3 shares
• Lots of SMB 3.0 sessions here at SDC...
• VMM offers to manage your infrastructure. We'll be focusing on storage. Lots enabled by Windows Server 2012.
• There's an entire layer in Windows Server 2012 dedicated to manage storage. Includes translation of WMI to SMI-S
• All of this can be leveraged using PowerShell.
• VMM NAS Management: Discovery (Servers, Systems, Shares), Creation/Removal (Systems, Shares), Share Permissions
• How did we get there? With a lot of help from our partners. Kick-off with EMC and NetApp. More soon. Plugfests.
• Pre-release providers. If you have any questions on the availability of providers, please ask EMC and NetApp.
• Moving now into demo mode. Select provider type. Specify discovery scope. Provide credentials. Discovering...
• Discovered some block storage and file storage. Some providers expose one of them, some expose both.
• Looking at all the pools and all the shares. Shallow discovery at first. After selection, we do deep discovery.
• Each pool is given a tag, called classification. Tagged some as Gold, some as Platinum. Finishing discovery.
• Deep discovery completed. Looking at the Storage tree in VMM, with arrays, pools, LUNs, file shares.
• Now using VMM to create a file share. Provide a name, description, file server, storage pool and size.
• Creates a logical disk in the pool, format with a file system, then create a file share. All automated.
• Now going to a Hyper-V host, add a file share to the host using VMM. Sets appropriate permissions for the share.
• VMM also checks the file access is good from that host.
• Now let's see how that works for Windows. Add a provider, abstracted. Using WMI, not SMI-S. Need credentials.
• Again, shows all shares, select for deep discovery. Full management available after that.
• Now we can assign Windows file share to the host, ACLs are set. Create a share. All very much the same as NAS.
• VMM also verifies the right permissions are set. VMM can also repair permission to the share if necessary.
• Now using VMM to create a new VM on the Windows SMB 3.0 file share. Same as NAS device with SMB 3.0.
• SMI-S support. Basic operations supported on SMI-S 1.4 and later. ACL management. requires SMI-S 1.6.
• SMI-S 1.4 profiles: File server, file share, file system discovery, file share creation, file share removal.
• Listing profiles that as required for SMI-S support with VMM. Partial list: NAS Head, File System, File Export
• SMI-S defines a number of namespaces. "Interop" namespace required. Associations are critical.
• Details on Discovery. namespaces, protocol support. Filter to get only SMB 3.0 shares.
• Discovery of File Systems. Reside on logical disks. That's the tie from file storage to block storage.
• Different vendors have different way to handle File Systems. Creating a new one is not trivial. Another profile.
• VMM creates the file system and file share in one step. Root of FS is the share. Keeping things simple.
• Permissions management. Integrated with Active Directory. Shares "registered" with Hyper-V host. VMM adds ACLs.
• Demo of VMM specific PowerShell walking the hierarchy from the array to the share and back.
• For VMM, NAS device and SMI-S must be integrated with Active Directory. Simple Identity Management Subprofile.
• CIM Passthrough API. WMI provider can be leveraged via code or PowerShell.

SMB 3, Hyper-V and ONTAP, Garrett Mueller, NetApp

• Senior Engineer at NetApp focused on CIFS/SMB.
• What we've done with over 30 developers: features, content for Windows Server 2012. SMB3, Witness, others.
• Data ONTAP cluster-mode architecture. HA pairs with high speed interconnect. disk "blade" in each node.
• Single SMB server spread across multiple nodes in the cluster. Each an SMB server with same configuration
• Each instance of the SMB server in a node has access to the volumes.
• Non-disruptive operations. Volume move (SMB1+). Logical Interface move (SMB2+). Move node/aggregate (SMB3).
• We did not have a method to preserve the locks between nodes. That was disruptive before SMB3.
• SMB 3 and Persistent Handles. Showing two nodes and how you can move a persistent SMB 3 handle.
• Witness can be used in lots of different ways. Completely separate protocol. NetApp scoped it to an HA pair.
• Diagram explaining how NetApp uses Witness protocol with SMB3 to discover, monitor, report failure.
• Remote VSS. VSS is Microsoft's solution for app consistent snapshot. You need to back up your shares!
• NetApp implemented a provider for Remote VSS for SMB shares using the documented protocol. Showing workflow.
• All VMs within a share are SIS cloned. SnapManager does backup. After done, temp SIS clones are removed.
• Can a fault occur during a backup. If there is a failure, the backup will fail. Not protected in that way.
• Offloaded Data Transfer (ODX). Intra-volume: SIS clones. Inter-volume/inter-node: back-end copy engine.
• ODX: The real benefit is in the fact that it's used by default in Windows Server 2012. It just works!
• ODX implications for Hyper-V over SMB: Rapid provisioning, rapid storage migrations, even disk within a VM.
• Hyper-V over SMB. Putting it all together. Non-disruptive operations, Witness, Remote VSS, ODX.
• No NetApp support for SMB Multichannel or SMB Direct (RDMA) with SMB 3.

Design and Implementation of SMB Locking in a Clustered File System with Aravind Velamur Srinivasan, EMC - Isilon

• Part of SMB team at EMC/Isilon. Talk agenda covers OneFS and its distributed locking mechanism.
• Overview of OneFS. NAS file server, scalable, 8x mirror, +4 parity. 3 to 144 nodes, using commodity hardware.
• Locking: avoid multiple writers to the same file. Potentially in different file server nodes.
• DLM challenges: Performance, multiple protocols ands requirements. Expose appropriate APIs.
• Diagram explaining the goals and mechanism of the Distributed Locking Manager (DLM) Isilon's OneFS
• Going over requirements of the DLM. Long list...

Scaling Storage to the Cloud and Beyond with Ceph with Sage Weil, Inktank

• Trying to catch up with ongoing talk on ceph. Sage Weil talks really fast and uses dense slides...
• Covering RADOS block device being used by virtualization, shared storage. http://ceph.com/category/rados/
• Covering ceph-fs. Metadata and data paths. Metadata server components. Combined with the object store for data.
• Legacy metadata storage: bad. Ceph-fs metadata does not use block lists or inode tables. Inode in directory.
• Dynamic subtree partitioning very scalable. Hundreds of metadata servers. Adaptive. Preserves locality.
• Challenge dealing metadata Io. Use metadata server as cache, prefect dir-inode. Large journal or log.
• What is journaled? Lots of state. Sessions, metadata changes. Lazy flush.
• Client protocol highly stateful. Metadata servers, direct access to IDS.
• explaining the ceph-fs workflow using ceph-mon, ceph-mds, ceph-osd.
• Snapshots. Volume and subvolume unusable at petabyte scale. Snapshot arbitrary directory
• client implementations. Linux kernel client. Use Samba to reexport as CIFS. Also NFS and Hadoop.
• Current status of the project: most components: status=awesome. Ceph-fs nearly awesome :-)
• Why do it? Limited options for scalable open source storage. Proprietary solutions expensive.
• What to do with hard links? They are rare. Using auxiliary table, a little more expensive, but works.
• How do you deal with running out of space? You don't. Make sure utilization on nodes balanced. Add nodes.

Introduction to the last day

• Big Data is like crude oil, it needs a lot of refining and filtering...
• Growing from 2.75 Zettabytes in 2012 to 8 ZB in 2015. Nice infographic showing projected growth...

The Evolving Apache Hadoop Eco System - What It Means for Big Data and Storage Developers, Sanjay Radia, Hortonworks

• One of the surprising things about Hadoop is that is does not RAID on the disks. It does surprise people.
• Data is growing. Lots of companies developing custom solutions since nothing commercial could handle the volume.
• web logs with terabytes of data. Video data is huge, sensors. Big Data = transactions + interactions + observations.
• Hadoop is commodity servers, jbod disk, horizontal scaling. Scale from small to clusters of thousands of servers..
• Large table with use cases for Hadoop. Retail, intelligence, finance, ...
• Going over classic processes with ETL, BI, Analytics. A single system cannot process huge amounts of data.
• Big change is introducing a "big data refinery". But you need a platform that scales. That's why we need Hadoop.
• Hadoop can use a SQL engine, or you can do key-value store, NoSQL. Big diagram with Enterprise data architecture.
• Hadoop offers a lot tools. Flexible metadata services across tools. Helps with the integration, format changes.
• Moving to Hadoop and Storage. Looking at diagram showing racks, servers, 6k nodes, 120PB. Fault tolerant, disk or node
• manageability. One operator managing 3000 nodes! Same boxes do both storage and computation.
• Hadoop uses very high bandwidth. Ethernet or InfiniBand. Commonly uses 40GbE.
• Namespace layer and Block storage layer. Block pool Isis a set of blocks, like a LUN. Did/file abstraction on namesp.
• Data is normally accessed locally, but can pull from any other servers. Deals with failures automatically.
• looking at HDFS. Goes back to 1978 paper on separating data from function in a DFS. Luster, Google, pNFS.
• I attribute the use of commodity hardware and replication to the GoogleFS. Circa 2003. Non-posix semantics.
• Computation close to data is an old model. Map Reduce.
• Significance of not using disk RAID. Replication factor of Hadoop is 3. Node can be fixed when convenient.
• HDFS recovers at a rate of 12GB in minutes, done in parallel. Even faster for larger clusters. Recovers automatically.
• Clearly there is an overhead. It's 3x instead of much less for RAID. Used only for some of the data.
• Generic storage service opportunities for innovation. Federation, partitioned namespace, independent block pools.
• Archival data. Where should it sit? Hadoop encourages keeping old data for future analysis. Hot/ cold? Tiers? Tape?
• Two versions of Hadoop. Hadoop 1 (GA) and Hadoop 2 (alpha). One is stable. Full stack HA work in progress.
• Hadoop full stack HA architecture diagram. Slave nodes layer + HA Cluster layer. Improving performance, DR, upgrades.
• upcoming features include snapshots, heterogeneous storage (flash drives), block grouping, other protocols (NFS).
• Which Apache Hadoop distro should you use? Little marketing of Hortonworks. Most stable version of components.
• It's a new product. At yahoo we needed to make sure we did not lose any data. Needs it to be stable.
• Hadoop changes the game. Cost, storage and compute. Scales to very very large. Open, growing ecosystem, no lock in.
• Question from the audience. What is Big Data? What is Hadoop? You don't' need to know what it is, just buy it :-)
• Sizing? The CPU performance and disk performance/capacity varies a lot. 90% of disk performance for sequential IO.
• Question: Security? Uses Kerberos authentication, you can conned to Active Directory. There is a paper on this.
• 1 name node to thousands of nodes, 200M files. Hadoop moving to more name nodes to match the capacity of working set.

Primary Data Deduplication in Windows Server 2012 with Sudipta Sengupta, Jim Benton

Sudipta Sengupta:

• Growing file storage market. Dedup is the #1 feature customers asking for. Lots of acquisitions in dedup space.
• What is deduplication, how to do it. Content based chucking using a sliding window, computing hashes. Rabin method.
• Dedup for data at rst, data on the wire. Savings in your primary storage more valuable, more expensive disks...
• Dimensions of the problem: Primary storage, locality, service data to components, commodity hardware.
• Extending the envelope from backup scenarios only to primary deduplication.
• Key design decisions: post-processing, granularity and chucking, scale slowly to data size, crash consistent
• Large scale study of primary datasets. Table with different workloads, chunking.
• Looking at whole-file vs. sub-file. Decided early on to do chunking. Looking at chunk size. Compress the chunks!
• Compression is more efficient on larger chunk sizes. Decided to use larger chunk size, pays off in metadata size.
• You don't want to compress unless there's a bang for the buck. 50% of chunks = 80% for compression savings.
• Basic version of the Rabin fingerprinting based chunking. Large chunks, but more uniform chunk size distribution
• In Windows average chunk size is 64KB. Jose: Really noticing this guy is in research :-) Math, diagrams, statistics
• Chunk indexing problem. Metadata too big to fit in RAM. Solution via unique chunk index architecture. Locality.
• Index very frugal on both memory usage and IOPs. 6 bytes of RAM per chunk. Data partitioning and reconciliation.

Jim Benton:

• Windows approach to data consistency and integrity. Mandatory block diagram with deduplication components.
• Looking at deduplication on-disk structures. Identify duplicate data (chunks), optimize target files (stream map)
• Chunk store file layout. Data container files: chunks and stream maps. Chunk ID has enough data to locate chunk
• Look at the rehydration process. How to get the file back from the steam map and chunks.
• Deduplicated file write path partial recall. Recall bitmap allows serving IO from file stream or chunk store.
• Crash consistency state diagram. One example with partial recall. Generated a lot of these diagrams for confidence.
• Used state diagrams to allow test team to induce failures and verify deduplication is indeed crash consistent.
• Data scrubbing. Induce redundancy back in, but strategically. Popular chunks get more copies. Checksum verified.
• Data scrubbing approach: Detection, containment, resiliency, scrubbing, repair, reporting. Lots of defensive code!
• Deduplication uses Storage Spaces redundancy. Can use that level to recover the data from another copy if possible.
• Performance for deduplication. Looking at a table with impact of dedup. Looking at options using less/more memory.
• Looking at resource utilization for dedup. Focus on converging them.
• Dedup performance varies depending on data access pattern. Time to open office file, almost no difference.
• Dedup. Time to copy large VHD file. Lots of common chunks. Actually reduces copy time for those VHD files. Caching.
• dedup write performance. Crash consistency hurts performance, so there is a hit. In a scenario, around 30% slower.
• Deduplication around the top features in Windows Server 2012. Mentions at The Register, Ars Technica, Windows IT Pro
• Lots of great questions being asked. Could not capture it all.

High Performance File Serving with SMB3 and RDMA via the SMBDirect Protocol with Tom Talpey and Greg Kramer

Tom Talpey:

• Where we are with SMB Direct, where we are going, some pretty cool performance results.
• Last year here at SDC we had our coming out party for SMB Direct. Review of what's SMB Direct.
• Nice palindromic port for SMB direct 5455. Protocol documented at MS-SMBD. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh536346(v=PROT.13).aspx …
• Covering the basic of SMB Direct. Only 3 message types. 2 way full duplex. Discovered via SMB Multichannel.
• Relationship with the NDKPI in Windows. Provider interface implemented by adapter vendors.
• Send/receive model. Possibly sent as train. Implements crediting. Direct placement (read/write). Scatter/gather list
• Going over the details on SMB Direct send transfers. Reads and writes, how they map to SMB3. Looking at read transfer
• looking at exactly how the RDMA reads and writes work. Actual offloaded transfers via RDMA. Also covering credits.
• Just noticed we have a relatively packed room for such a technical talk...And it's the larger room here...
• interesting corner cases for crediting. Last credit case. Async, cancels and errors. No reply, many/large replies
• SMB Direct efficiency. Two pipes, one per direction, independent. Truly bidirectional. Server pull model. Options.
• SMB Direct options for RDMA efficiency. FRMR, silent completions, coalescing, etc.
• Server pull model allows for added efficiency, in addition to improved security. Server controls all RDMA operations.

Greg Kramer:

• On the main event. That's why you're here, right? Performance...
• SDC 2011 results. 160k iops, 3.2 GBytes/sec.
• New SDC 2012 results. Dual CX3 InfiniBand, Storage Spaces, two SAS HBAs, SSDs. SQLIO tool.
• Examining the results. 7.3 Gbytes / sec with 512KB IOs at 8.6% CPU. 453K 8KB IOs at 60% CPU.
• Taking it 11. Three InfiniBand links. Six SAS HBAs. 48 SSDs. 16.253 GBytes/sec!!! Still low CPU utilization...
• NUMA effects on performance. Looking at NUMA disabled versus enabled. 16% percent in CPU utilization.
• That's great! Now what? Looking at potential techniques to reduce the cost of IOs, increase IOPs further.
• Looking at improving how invalidation consumes CPU cycles, RNIC bus cycles. But you do need to invalidate agressively
• Make invalidate cheaper. Using "send with invalidate". Invalidate done as early as possible, fewer round trips.
• Send with invalidate: supported in InfiniBand, iwarp and roce. No changes to SMB direct protocol. Not committed plan
• Shout out to http://smb3.info  Thanks, Greg!
• Question: RDMA and encryption? Yes, you can combine them. SMB Direct will use RDMA send recives in that case.
• Question: How do you monitor at packet level? Use Message Analyzer. But careful drinking from the fire hose :-)
• Question: Performance monitor? There are counters for RDMA, look out for stalls, hints on how to optimize.

SMB 3.0 Application End-to-End Performance with Dan Lovinger

• Product is released now, unlike last year. We're now showing final results...
• Scenarios with OLTP database, cluster motion, Multichannel. How we found issues during development.
• Summary statistics. You can drown on river with an average depth of six inches.
• Starting point: Metric versus time. Averages are not enough, completely miss what's going on.
• You should think about distribution. Looking at histogram. The classic Bell Curve. 34% to each side.
• Standard deviation and median. Mid point of all data points. What makes sense for latency, bandwidth?
• Looking at percentiles. Cumulative distributions. Remember that from College?
• OLTP workload. Transaction rate, cumulative distribution. How we found and solved an issue that makes SMB ~= DAS
• OLTP. Log file is small to midsize sequential IO, database file is small random IO.
• Found 18-year-old perfor bug that affects only SMB and only in an OLTP workload. Leftover from FAT implementation.
• Found this "write bubble" performance bug look at average queue length. Once fixed, SMB =~ DAS.
• back to OLTP hardware configuration. IOPs limited workload does not need fast interconnect.
• Comparing SMB v. DAS transaction rate at ingest. 1GbE over SMB compared to 4GbFC. Obviously limited by bandwidth.
• As soon as the ingest phase is done, then 1GbE is nearly identical to 4GbFC. IOPs limited on disks. SMB=~DAS.
• This is just a sample of why workload matters, why we need these performance analysis to find what we can improve.
• IOmeter and SQLIO are not enough. You need to look at a real workload to find these performance issues.
• Fix for this issue in Windows Server 2012 and also back ported to Windows Server 2008 R2.
• Another case: Looking at what happens when you move a cluster resource group from one node to another.
• 3 file server cluster groups, 40 disk on each. How resource control manager handles the move. Needed visualization.
• Looking at a neat visualization of how cluster disks are moved from one node to another. Long pole operations.
• Found that every time we offline a disk, there as a long running operation that was not needed. We fixed that.
• We also found a situation that took multiple TCP timeouts, leading to long delay in the overall move. Fixed!
• Final result, dramatic reduction of cluster move time. Entire move time from 55 seconds to under 10 seconds.
• Now we can do large cluster resource group moves with 120 disks in under 10 seconds. Not bad...
• Last case study. SMB Multichannel performance. Looking at test hardware configuration. 24 SSDs, 2 SAS HBAs, IOmeter
• Looking at local throughput at different IO sizes, as a baseline.
• SMB Multichannel. We can achieve line rate saturation at about 16KB with four 40GBE interfaces.
• Curve for small IOs matches between DAS and SMB at line rate..

Closing tweet

• #SDConference is finished. Thanks for a great event! Meet you at SNW Fall 2012 in a month, right back here. On my way back to Redmond now...

I have three presentations lined up for the ComputerWorld/SNIA SNW Fall 2012 Conference, scheduled for October 16-19, 2012 in Santa Clara, California. Here are the details for each one, taken from the official event web site.

Industry Perspective: High Throughput File Servers with SMB Direct, Using the Three Flavors of RDMA network adapters
Wednesday, 10/17/2012, 11:40 AM -12:25 PM

In Windows Server 2012, we introduce the “SMB Direct” protocol, which allows file servers to use high throughput/low latency RDMA network interfaces. However, there are three distinct flavors of RDMA, each with their own specific requirements and advantages, their own pros and cons. In this session, we'll look into iWARP, InfiniBand and RoCE, outline the differences between them. We'll also list the specific vendors that offer each technology and provide step-by-step instructions for anyone planning to deploy them. The talk will also include an update on RDMA performance and a customer case study.

Industry Perspective: Hyper-V over SMB: Remote File Storage Support in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
Friday, 10/19/2012, 10:20 AM - 11:05 AM

In this session, we cover the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V support for remote file storage using SMB 3.0. This introduces a new first-class storage option for Hyper-V that is a flexible, easy to use and cost-effective alternative to block storage. We detail the basic requirements for Hyper-V over SMB and outline the specific enhancements to SMB 3.0 to support server application storage, including SMB Transparent Failover, SMB Scale-Out, SMB Multichannel, SMB Direct (SMB over RDMA), SMB Encryption, SMB PowerShell, SMB performance counters and VSS for Remote File Shares. We conclude with a few suggested configurations for Hyper-V over SMB, including both standalone and clustered options. SMB 3.0 is an open protocol family, which is being implemented by several major vendors of enterprise NAS, and by the Samba open-source CIFS/SMB package in Linux and other operating systems.

SNIA Tutorial: SMB Remote File Protocol (including SMB 3.0)
Friday, 10/19/2012, 11:15 AM - 12:00 PM

The SMB protocol has 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, announced at the SNIA SDC Conference in September 2011, is expected to have its first commercial implementations by Microsoft, NetApp and EMC by the end of 2012 (and potentially more later). This SNIA Tutorial describes the basic architecture of the SMB protocol and basic operations, including connecting to a share, negotiating a dialect, executing operations and disconnecting from a share. The second part of the talk will cover improvements in the version 2.0 of the protocol, including a reduced command set, support for asynchronous operations, compounding of operations, durable and resilient file handles, file leasing and large MTU support. The final part of the talk covers the latest changes in the SMB 3.0 version, including persistent handles (SMB Transparent Failover), active/active clusters (SMB Scale-Out), multiple connections per sessions (SMB Multichannel), support for RDMA protocols (SMB Direct), snapshot-based backups (VSS for Remote File Shares) opportunistic locking of folders (SMB Directory Leasing), and SMB encryption.

If you’re not registered yet, there’s still time. Visit the official web site at http://www.snwusa.com and click on the Register link. I look forward to seeing you there…

Introduction 

Maybe you’re lucky enough to work for a company that has standardized on SharePoint portals and ASP.NET applications across the board. In that case, you do not need to integrate different types of portals and web applications. For most large corporations, though, there will be many portals and different technologies behind those portals. I am currently working with one of those large enterprises that use non-Microsoft portals (from Linux/Apache/PHP sites all to the way to WebSphere) that need to integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.

The question on how to integrate those with SharePoint is asked quite often. Sometimes there is a need to leverage content stored in SharePoint sites. In some cases SharePoint must consume data hosted in the other portals. There are many options to integrate SharePoint in those cases, so I compiled a list of different technologies you can leverage. Please note that I do not include in the list any of the WSS/MOSS SDK facilities to integrate with other ASP.NET applications, focusing on options applicable when working with a portal not hosted in a Microsoft-centric environment. I included ideas on how to integrate by producing and consuming links, e-mails, RSS feeds, IFrames, WSRP portlets, Web Services and Search.

1. Links

One simple way to integrate two web applications is simply providing links from one to the other. If you maintain a similar User Interface in both, users might not even notice the transitions.

1a. Links – Producer

SharePoint is fundamentally an ASP.NET application and you can link to any WSS or MOSS site, list, library or item directly. There are also ways to link directly to specific views or actions associated with items. It would be possible, for instance, to have a URL pointing directly to the page that adds an item to a list.

1b. Links – Consumer

SharePoint also provides rich support for hosting external links. You can use the built-in navigation facilities to link to items hosted outside MOSS. For instance, you can add a top navigation link or a quick launch link directly to a URL outside MOSS. You also have the choice to open the link in a new window or not. You also have a specific list type to store links and you can add external sites in other areas like the Site Directory. There are also many other out-of-the-box web parts where you can link to something living outside SharePoint.

Reference: How to customize navigation: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA101191001033.aspx

2. E-mail

E-mail via the SMTP protocol is something that we have used reliably for a long time. You can get data in and out of SharePoint using it and you’ll likely find some level of support in many other portals.

2a. E-mail – Producer

You can get e-mail alerts from any SharePoint list and it should not be hard to use that information to populate information in another portal. You can also associate a custom workflow to any list to send an e-mail to an external address every time a list item is added or updated, with the ability to format the body of the e-mail with properties of the item. Although those alerts and workflow-generated e-mails are typically sent to humans, they could be useful in an integration scenario, especially if your target can parse the mail message to isolate the individual properties. 

2b. E-mail – Consumer

You can configure any SharePoint list to be mail-enabled. With that, you can send e-mails directly to a SharePoint discussion list, add a blog entry or post a document attached to a message to a document library. A workflow or event handler could be use to further process items received that way to perform specific actions as these items are added.

Reference: How to add content to sites using e-mails: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA100867301033.aspx

3. RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a simple format to describe digital content. RSS is increasingly used on the Internet to provide information about frequently updated information like news feeds and blog posts.

3a. RSS – Producer

You can enable any SharePoint list (including document libraries, calendars, task lists, blogs and wiki libraries) to provide an RSS feed. You have options to select which columns are provided in the feed (like title, date and author) and you can set a limit for the number of items and how old the items can be. Each RSS feed for a specific list has a URL and it comes to the client as an XML document.

References: How to manage RSS feeds: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA100214251033.aspx

3b. RSS – Consumer

SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box web part called “RSS Viewer”, which allows you to place an RSS feed in any WSS page. You have a number of configuration options including obviously the URL where the feed comes from, how many items should be displayed and multiple options on how each one is shown.

4. IFrame

IFrames are HTML elements that let you display an HTML page inside another one. Most modern browsers will let you place this <iframe> HTML markup within a page, specifying the URL to the other page and the dimensions of the frame, among other options.

Reference: IFrame: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/frames.html

4a. IFrame – Producer

You obviously can include any SharePoint page into a page in another portal using an IFrame. The main issue there is the fact that you will get the MOSS navigation in that IFrame, which typically is not desired. To overcome that, you can create a special MOSS page that hides all those elements and show just the element you want to expose. To accomplish that, you can create a “minimal” master page and a simple layout with a single web part zone.

Reference: How to create a minimal master page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa660698.aspx

4b. IFrame – Consumer

SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box web part called “Page Viewer”, which allows you to display any other page as an IFrame.

5. WSRP

Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) aims to standardize interactions between portals using a special set of markups to make it easy to consume a portion of the overall user portal without having to write unique code.

Reference: WSRP 1.0 specification from OASIS: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/3343/oasis-200304-wsrp-specification-1.0.pdf

5a. WSRP – Producer

Microsoft does not provide an out-of-the-box WSRP producer. However, you can leverage a third party solution like NetUnity Software to provide that functionality.

Reference: Blog about WSRP in SharePoint: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikefitz/archive/2006/02/06/525536.aspx
Reference: NetUnity Software web site: http://www.netunitysoftware.com

5b. WSRP – Consumer

SharePoint provides an out-of-the-box web part called “WSRP Consumer Web Part”, which allows you to display a WSRP portlet in a MOSS page.

Reference: How to use the WSRP Consumer Web Part: http://www.wssdemo.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=d5813c18%2D934f%2D4fd6%2D9068%2D5cdd59ce56ba&ID=234

6. Web Services

Web Services (as defined by the W3C) are a series of standards to allow computers to communicate using XML messages and SOAP, describing their operations via WSDL. If a system exposes their functionality that way, any client supporting those standards can interact with it.

Reference: http://www.w3.org/2002/ws

6a. Web Services – Producer

SharePoint exposes a lot of its functionality using Web Services over HTTP. This can be used, for instance, to get a list of libraries on a site, to add an item to a list, to get information about users, etc. SharePoint web services are implemented using the .NET Framework and they use SOAP, XML and HTTP, also providing a WSDL. The SharePoint SDK includes a complete reference of all the web services available and the list includes: Administration, Alerts, Authentication, Copy, Document Workspace, Forms, Imaging, List Data Retrieval, Lists, Meetings, People, Permissions, SharePoint Directory Management, Site Data, Sites, Search, Users and Groups, Versions, Views, Web Part Pages, and Webs.

Reference: List of Web Services in WSS/MOSS: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms445760.aspx

6b. Web Services – Consumer

SharePoint can leverage web services exposed by other applications using the Business Data Catalog (BDC). This is done using an XML-based definition of what is exposed by that application and usually involves describing entities, properties and actions that are exposed by that application. Once the BDC definition is in place, you can expose those via the BDC-related web parts. You can also integrate the BDC data as a content source for Search. Another option is to write a custom web part that consumes the external web service and provides a user interface to interact with it.

Reference: Business Data Catalog Overview: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms551230.aspx

P.S.: Also, as suggested by Ian Morrish, the Data Form Web Part (known as Data View Web Part in the previous version) can render Web Services and XML using XSL. For details around this, check http://www.sharepointblogs.com/ssa/archive/2007/02/24/showing-web-service-data-in-a-data-view-web-part.aspx

7. Search

Search is usually a main component of a portal. When two portals are interacting, they will typically need to search or be searched by each other.

7a. Search – Producer

SharePoint exposes all its data via HTTP and you can configure any search engine to crawl it. The search engine would start with a site directory and for each site it will use the “View All Site Content” link on the quick launch to discover all lists and libraries on the site. SharePoint also has a crawl web service that could be leveraged to enumerate all site collections even if you don’t have a site directory.

Reference: How the MOSS crawl works: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2007/03/19/crawling-sharepoint-sites-using-the-sps3-protocol-handler.aspx

7b. Search – Consumer

SharePoint can index several types of content sources beyond SharePoint sites. That includes any HTTP-based web site, file shares using SMB and anything you are consuming via the BDC. You basically need to define a content source in the Search SSP to describe how and when your crawl should run. You can also develop your own protocol handler to address custom scenarios.

Reference: How SharePoint crawls content: http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/f32cb02e-e396-46c5-a65a-e1b045152b6b1033.mspx

8. WebDav

Although not really an integration technology, WebDAV provides a way to download and upload files hosted in SharePoint. This is what clients leverage for the explorer view and there are many clients that can interact that way.

9. AJAX

AJAX is not a specific technology but a set of technologies, mostly related to using client-side javascript to asynchronously do post backs and partial page refreshes. If you are using AJAX, you can leverage some of the other technologies mentioned here to interact with SharePoint. There is no out-of-the-box web part to host AJAX code, but there’s already many discussions detailing how to support this scenario and leverage it inside a web part.

Reference: Information about ASP.NET-based AJAX: http://ajax.asp.net
Reference: Building a web part that uses AJAX: http://www.capdes.com/2007/02/microsoft_office_sharepoint_se.html
Reference: Building a web part that uses AJAX: http://sharethispoint.com/archive/2007/02/28/Using-a-SPGridView-inside-an-ASP.net-Ajax-UpdatePanel.aspx

Conclusion 

I hope that helps you sort out the multiple different integration points and will allow you to choose the best technology for your specific case. There are certainly a lot of details to account for, like whether you are planning to write custom code to help with the integration (and if you are, on what side you will be hosting that code) and how the authentication between the two systems will work (Kerberos is your friend and so is MOSS 2007 SSO).

I find the RSS feeds option quite interesting, since it is easy to implement, provides much more functionality than simple links, allows for some level of customization and could even work well with an AJAX-type solution. If you can get away with that one, you will certainly have a lot less to worry about.

Introduction

SMB (Server Message Block) is a remote file protocol commonly used by Microsoft Windows clients and servers that dates back to 1980’s. Back when it was first used, LANs speeds were typically 10Mbps or less, WAN use was very limited and there were no Wireless LANs. Network security concerns like preventing man-in-the-middle attacks were non-existent at that time. Obviously, things have changed a lot since then. SMB did evolve over time, but it did so incrementally and with great care for keeping backward compatibility. It was only with SMB2 in 2007 that we had the first major redesign.

A History of SMB and CIFS

When it was first introduced to the public, the remote file protocol was called SMB (Server Message Block). SMB was used, for instance, by Microsoft LAN Manager in 1987 and by Windows for Workgroups in 1992. Later, a draft specification was submitted to the IETF under the name Common Internet File System (CIFS). The CIFS specification is a description of the protocol as it was implemented in 1996 as part of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. A preliminary draft of the IETF CIFS 1.0 specification was published in 1997. Later, extensions were made to address other scenarios like domains, Kerberos, shadow copy, server to server copy and SMB signing. Windows 2000 (released in 2000) included those extensions. At that time, some people went back to calling the protocol SMB once again. CIFS/SMB has also been implemented on Unix, Linux and many other operating systems (either as part of the OS or as a server suite like Samba). A few times, those communities also extended the CIFS/SMB protocol to address their own specific requirements.

One important limitation of SMB was its “chattiness” and lack of concern for network latency. It would take a series of synchronous round trips to accomplish many of the most common tasks. The protocol was not created with WAN or high-latency networks in mind and there was limited use of compounding (combining multiple commands in a single network packet) or pipelining (sending additional commands before the answer to a previous command arrives). This even led to products created to address the specific issues around SMB WAN acceleration. There were also limitations regarding the number of open files, shares and users. Due to the large number of commands and subcommands, the protocol was also difficult to extend, maintain and secure.

Introducing SMB2

The first major redesign of SMB happened with the release of SMB2 by Microsoft. SMB2 was introduced with Windows Vista in 2007 and updated with the release of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 in 2008.

SMB2 brought a number of improvements, including but not limited to:

• Reduced complexity, going from over 100 commands and subcommands to just 19 (see details below)
• General mechanisms for data pipelining and credit-based flow control (see details below)
• Request compounding, which allows multiple SMB requests to be sent as a single network request (see details below)
• Larger reads and writes make better use of faster networks, even with high latency
• Caching of folder and file properties, where clients keeps local copy of information on folders and files
• Durable handles allow an SMB2 connection to transparently reconnect to the server if there is a temporary loss of network connectivity
• Message signing improved (HMAC SHA-256 replaces MD5 as hashing algorithm) and configuration/interoperability issues simplified
• Improved scalability for file sharing (number of users, shares and open files per server greatly increased)
• Protocol works well with Network Address Translation (VC count is gone)
• Extension mechanism (for instance, create context or variable offsets)
• Support for symbolic links

It is important to highlight that, to ensure interoperability, SMB2 uses the existing SMB1 connection setup mechanisms, and then advertises that it is capable of a new version of the protocol. Because of that, if the opposite end does not support SMB2, SMB1 will be used.

The SMB2 protocol specification was published publicly by Microsoft and you can find the link at the end of this post.

Reduced Complexity

One of the ways to showcase the reduced complexity in SMB2 is to make a comparison to the commands and subcommands in the old version.

Here is the complete list of the 19 opcodes (or commands) used by SMB2 in the message exchanges between the client and the server, grouped in three categories:

• Protocol negotiation, user authentication and share access (NEGOTIATE, SESSION_SETUP, LOGOFF, TREE_CONNECT, TREE_DISCONNECT)
• File, directory and volume access (CANCEL, CHANGE_NOTIFY, CLOSE, CREATE, FLUSH, IOCTL, LOCK, QUERY_DIRECTORY, QUERY_INFO, READ, SET_INFO, WRITE)
• Other (ECHO, OPLOCK_BREAK)

When you try to get a similar list for the old SMB, things get a little more complex. I tried to make a list of all commands and subcommands using only the documents linked below and came up with over 100:

• Protocol negotiation, user authentication and share access (NEGOTIATE, SESSION_SETUP_ANDX, TRANS2_SESSION_SETUP, LOGOFF_ANDX, PROCESS_EXIT, TREE_CONNECT, TREE_CONNECT_ANDX, TREE_DISCONNECT)
• File, directory and volume access (CHECK_DIRECTORY, CLOSE, CLOSE_PRINT_FILE, COPY, CREATE, CREATE_DIRECTORY, CREATE_NEW, CREATE_TEMPORARY, DELETE, DELETE_DIRECTORY, FIND_CLOSE, FIND_CLOSE2, FIND_UNIQUE, FLUSH, GET_PRINT_QUEUE,  IOCTL, IOCTL_SECONDARY, LOCK_AND_READ, LOCK_BYTE_RANGE, LOCKING_ANDX, MOVE, NT_CANCEL, NT_CREATE_ANDX, NT_RENAME, NT_TRANSACT, NT_TRANSACT_CREATE, NT_TRANSACT_IOCTL, NT_TRANSACT_NOTIFY_CHANGE, NT_TRANSACT_QUERY_QUOTA, NT_TRANSACT_QUERY_SECURITY_DESC, NT_TRANSACT_RENAME, NT_TRANSACT_SECONDARY, NT_TRANSACT_SET_QUOTA, NT_TRANSACT_SET_SECURITY_DESC, OPEN, OPEN_ANDX, OPEN_PRINT_FILE, QUERY_INFORMATION, QUERY_INFORMATION_DISK, QUERY_INFORMATION2, READ, READ_ANDX, READ_BULK, READ_MPX, READ_RAW, RENAME, SEARCH, SEEK, SET_INFORMATION, SET_INFORMATION2, TRANS2_CREATE_DIRECTORY, TRANS2_FIND_FIRST2, TRANS2_FIND_NEXT2, TRANS2_FIND_NOTIFY_FIRST, TRANS2_FIND_NOTIFY_NEXT, TRANS2_FSCTL , TRANS2_GET_DFS_REFERRAL, TRANS2_IOCTL2, TRANS2_OPEN2, TRANS2_QUERY_FILE_INFORMATION, TRANS2_QUERY_FS_INFORMATION, TRANS2_QUERY_PATH_INFORMATION, TRANS2_QUERY_PATH_INFORMATION, TRANS2_REPORT_DFS_INCONSISTENCY, TRANS2_SET_FILE_INFORMATION, TRANS2_SET_FS_INFORMATION, TRANS2_SET_PATH_INFORMATION, TRANSACTION, TRANSACTION_SECONDARY, TRANSACTION2, TRANSACTION2_SECONDARY, UNLOCK_BYTE_RANGE, WRITE, WRITE_AND_CLOSE, WRITE_AND_UNLOCK, WRITE_ANDX, WRITE_BULK, WRITE_BULK_DATA, WRITE_COMPLETE, WRITE_MPX, WRITE_MPX_SECONDARY, WRITE_PRINT_FILE, WRITE_RAW)
• Other (ECHO, TRANS_CALL_NMPIPE, TRANS_MAILSLOT_WRITE, TRANS_PEEK_NMPIPE, TRANS_QUERY_NMPIPE_INFO, TRANS_QUERY_NMPIPE_STATE, TRANS_RAW_READ_NMPIPE, TRANS_RAW_WRITE_NMPIPE, TRANS_READ_NMPIPE, TRANS_SET_NMPIPE_STATE, TRANS_TRANSACT_NMPIPE, TRANS_WAIT_NMPIPE, TRANS_WRITE_NMPIPE)

I make no claim that the list above for SMB is exact or complete, but it does make a point. As an interesting exercise, check the lists above to verify that, while SMB2 has a single WRITE operation, there are 14 distinct WRITE operations in the old protocol.

SMB2 also requires TCP as a transport. SMB2 no longer supports NetBIOS over IPX, NetBIOS over UDP or NetBEUI (as SMB version 1 did).

Pipelining

A key improvement in SMB2 is the way it makes it easy for clients to send a number of outstanding requests to a server. This allows the client to build a pipeline of requests instead of waiting for a response before sending the next request.  This is especially relevant when using a high latency network.

SMB2 uses a credit based flow control, which allows the server to control a client’s behavior. The server will start with a small number of credits and automatically scale up as needed. With this, the protocol can keep more data “in flight” and better utilize the available bandwidth.

This is key to make a large transfer go from hours (in SMB) to minutes (in SMB2) in a “long and fat pipe” (high bandwidth, high latency network).

For an example of how pipelining in SMB2 can improve performance, check this other blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/11/11/file-server-performance-improvements-with-the-smb2-protocol-in-windows-server-2008.aspx

Compounding

When you look at the command set for the new SMB2 protocol, you notice that they are all simple operations. The old SMB1 protocol had some complex commands and subcommands that combined a set of simple operations as required in specific scenarios.

One of the important changes in SMB2 is the ability to send an arbitrary set of commands in a single request (single network round trip). This is called compounding and it can be use to mimic the old complex operations in SMB1 without the added complexity of a larger command set.

For instance, an old SMB1 RENAME command can be replaced by a single request in SMB2 that combines three commands: CREATE (which can create a new file or open an existing file), SET_INFO and CLOSE. The same can be done for many other complex SMB1 commands and subcommands like LOCK_AND_READ and WRITE_AND_UNLOCK.

This compounding ability in SMB2 is very flexible and the chain of commands can be unrelated (executed separately, potentially in parallel) or related (executed in sequence, with the output of one command available to the next). The responses can also be compounded or sent separately.

This new compounding feature in SMB2 can be used to perform a specific task in less time due to the reduced number of network round trips.

Conclusion

I hope this post has helped you understand some of the important improvements in SMB2, particularly in regards to reduced complexity, pipelining and compounding.

Reference

Below is a list of important links that document SMB2, SMB and CIFS, including the latest protocol specifications published by Microsoft:

[MS-SMB2]: Server Message Block (SMB) Version 2.0 Protocol Specification
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc212614.aspx

[MS-SMB]: Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol Specification
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc212363.aspx

[MS-CIFS]: Common Internet File System (CIFS) Protocol Specification
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee442092(PROT.13).aspx

Microsoft Protocol Programs
http://www.microsoft.com/protocols

Here's also a few publicly available presentations on SMB2:

SNIA Tutorial on SMB2 by Jim Pinkerton
http://www.snia.org/images/tutorial_docs/Networking/JimPinkerton-SMB2_Big_Improvements_Remote_FS_Protocol-v3.pdf

SDC Presentation on SMB 2.1 by David Kruse
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/DavidKruse_SMBv21.pdf

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 6th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 14th. This event is also co-located with the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest. For those working with storage technologies, this event gathers a unique crowd and includes a rich agenda that you can find at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/agenda2009.

Looking at the agenda, you can see it includes presentations and/or panels with key industry players like Amazon, Brocade, EMC, Emulex, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Isilon, The Linux Foundation, LSI, Microsoft, NetApp, The Samba Team, Sun, Symantec, Tata, Ubiqx, Western Digital and Wipro, just to mention a few names you should readily recognize.

Microsoft is the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest Underwriter and the presentations from Microsoft include topics like BranchCache, Green Technologies, Data Classification on File Servers, Windows File System Transactions, SMB version 2.1, Storage in Virtual Machine Manager, SMB2 Model Based Testing, File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT), DFS-Namespaces Scalability, Storage Management and Delete Notifications in Windows 7. Microsoft is also participating in the panel on Cloud Storage. I am helping deliver the presentations on FSCT and DFS-N, along with a few colleagues, and I will also spend time at the PlugFest.

On last thing about the SDC and probably one of the most important ones is that the presentations are usually delivered to developers by the actual product teams and frequently the actual developer of the technology is either delivering the presentation or is in the room to take questions. That kind of deep insight is not common in every conference out there. For instance, I remember last year when there was a discussion (during Q&A) about something related to both NTFS and SMB. It was great to see senior developers from both teams in the room (one was the presenter and one was in the audience), discussing with attendees a specific topic that spanned both the local file system and the remote file serving protocol.

Registration is open at  http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/ and you should definitely plan to be there. If you are attending, leave a comment and let’s plan to meet when we get there!

Version 1.0 of the File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) was announced yesterday during a presentation by Jian Yan and  Bartosz Nyczkowski at SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The presentation covered a number of details about FSCT and included a demo running FSCT with the HomeFolders workload.

If you are not familiar with FSCT, the download page offers this overview: “File server capacity planning and performance troubleshooting are critical aspects of high-level network administration. Central file servers and distributed client workstations are now the norm in most corporate networks. This structure reduces storage capacity requirements, centralizes backup, increases the availability of files, and simplifies the document revision and review process. However, because data storage and access are centralized, performance limitations impact the entire network population. Accurately projecting the number of users that hardware can support under a specific workload, and understanding when and where bottlenecks occur, are critical to making efficient improvements to the server configuration. File server capacity planning tools can be valuable in choosing new hardware for purchase, identifying the capacity of existing hardware, locating existing bottlenecks, and planning for resource expansion in advance of resource exhaustion. The throughput capacity of a file server can be expressed either as the maximum number of operations per second or a maximum number of users supported by the configuration. These values are influenced by several factors, some of which include processor speed, available memory, disk speed, network throughput and latency, and the speed with which SMB requests are processed.”

The final version is available for download in both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions. It is supported on  Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista and  Windows 7 (with the latest service pack applied).

Downloads are available now:
x64: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b20db7f1-15fd-40ae-9f3a-514968c65643
x86: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0b212272-1884-4af1-972d-42ef1db9f977

A white paper is also included in the download packages, with detailed description of the tool, step-by-step instructions on how to use it and reference of the command line interface.

For questions about FSCT and how to use it, please use the forum at
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/fsct/threads

Also check some details on FSCT on these previous posts (from the release of the beta last year and the release candidate back in July):
http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2009/07/08/file-server-capacity-tool-fsct-release-candidate-available-for-download.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/10/06/fsct-a-cifs-smb-smb2-file-server-tool-for-capacity-planning-and-performance-troubleshooting.aspx

This is a major milestone in the two-year journey to offer this tool publicly, which included efforts from a number of people from different teams at Microsoft, including the File Server Team and the Windows Performance Team.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 7th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 20th. As usual, Microsoft is underwriting the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 Plugfest, which is co-located with the SDC event.

For developers working with storage-related technologies, this event gathers a unique crowd and includes a rich agenda that you can find at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2010/agenda2010.  All the key industry players are represented. It lists presentations from Atrato, Brocade, EMC, Facebook, Fujitsu America, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Isilon Systems, LSI, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, Panasas, Quantum Corporation, TATA Consultancy Services, the Samba Team, Unisys, VMware, Wipro Technologies, Xiotech and many others.

It’s always worth reminding you that the SDC presentations are usually delivered to developers by the actual product development teams and frequently the actual developer of the technology is either delivering the presentation or is in the room to take questions. That kind of deep insight is not common in every conference out there.

Microsoft presentations this year include:

Registration is open at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2010/registration and you should definitely plan to attend. If you are registered, leave a comment and let’s plan to meet when we get there!

If you’re following me on Twitter, you probably noticed I am attending SNIA’s Software Developer’s Conference 2010 (SDC 2010) and the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 PlugFest this week.
The agenda for the event is published at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2010/agenda2010.
Here are some random notes from the event, some of them taken from a few earlier tweets (some sessions are just mentioned, others have a few notes).
I’ll keep updating today and tomorrow.

PlugFest

• 25 companies attending the PlugFest
• The place was busy starting on Sunday, 09/19
• Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 “Birds of a Feather” session today at 7:30 PM, after the PlugFest Open House
• File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) “Birds of a Feather” session today at 8:30 PM

Session: "The Long and Winding Road to SMB/CIFS specs" by Christopher Hertel and Jose Rivera (both from ubiqx)

• Christopher on CIFS: "CIFS is dead. Actually, CIFS is undead. Also, CIFS is documented."
• See [MS-CIFS] at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee442092(PROT.10).aspx
• Christopher on SMB: "SMB=Server Message Block, Super Mario Brothers or Small and Medium Business" :-)
• See [MS-SMB] at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc246231(PROT.13).aspx
• Christopher: "The old SMB/CIFS (pre-SMB2) is like the Winchester House, full of strange stairs, rooms and windows"
• Christopher on SMB2: "If you are a CIFS/SMB implementer and you are not working on SMB2, you are behind and you need to run to catch up."
• See [MS-SMB2] at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc246482(PROT.13).aspx
• Christopher: "BranchCache is also documented and it further enhances WAN performance."
• Jose: "One good way to get started is the Implementing CIFS book. It's available online." http://ubiqx.org/cifs/Book.html
• Jose: "Free test suites: FSCT from Microsoft and smbtorture from Samba Team."
• Jose: "Unix Extensions for SMB2" http://www.unixsmb2.org/

Session: "MS-FSA: Describing wire visible behavior of MS File Systems" by Neal Christiansen, Microsoft

• [MS-FSA] documents algorithms that would otherwise have to be described in many other documents like CIFS, SMB, SMB2
• Available for download from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff469524(PROT.10).aspx
• [MS-FSSC] (File System Control Codes) is an important support document for MS-FSA and other documents
• Available for download from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc231987(PROT.13).aspx
• Going over a few of the algoriths described in [MS-FSA]
• Name tunneling: preserves attributes of the file in certain situations (from 8.3 name transition)
• Alternate Data Stream: Some interesting behaviors. For instance, by default, an empty primary DS is created
• Byte range locks. Interesting concept of zero length ranges. FSBO also has some more info on those
• USN journal or change journal. Describes the location points where the journal is updated
• Directory change notification. You can see the many trigger points, what flags are set
• Oplocks. How they are granted and how the different types interact. FSBO also has some nice tables on this
• Deleting files. Interesting details on delete-on-close and delete-pending states
• Valid Data Length (VDL). Allows setting file size without writing zeroes to newly allocated space
• Object GUID. File can be opened by ObjectID. Requirements for setting, retrieving
• Extended Attributes (EA). Name value/pairs to storage metadata associated with a file
• Reparse Points: An open can be redirected. Used by symbolic links. Mutually exclusive with EAs
• Symbolic Links and Mount Points. Implemented as reparse points

Session: “Challenges of 10 Gb iSCSI/FCOE Array Certification” by Mahmoud Jibbe, LSI

Session: “Comparison btw Samba 3 and Likewise Lwiod SMB FileServers” by Steven Danneman, Isilon

Session: “Status of Clustered CIFS Using Samba” by Volker Lendecke, Samba Team / SerNet

Session: “Implementing SMB2 within Samba” by Jeremy Allison, Google

Session: “SMB2 Meeting Linux” by Steve French, IBM

Session: Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 BoF session

• Covered the main differences between Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2
  • Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3
  • Single Instance Storage (SIS)
  • Browser-based Remote Management using RDP
  • OOBE (Out-of-the-box Experience), including two-node cluster OOBE
• Highlights of the main improvements in the Storage Server Components
• For a recent webcast on WSS 2008 R2, check on http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica/WSV323

File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT) BoF session today at 8:30 PM

• Overview of the tool itself, how it works, how to set it up
• Check http://blogs.technet.com/b/josebda/archive/2009/09/16/file-server-capacity-tool-fsct-1-0-available-for-download.aspx
• Also reviewed FSCT sample results from Scott’s presentation at http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/te/NorthAmerica/2010/pptx/WSV323.pptx

Session: Welcome Remarks by Wayne Adams (SNIA Board Chairman) and Mark Carlson (SDC Committee Chairman)

• SNIA CloudBurst Summit will be broadcast live on Thursday. http://www.snia.org/cloud/Cloudburst/
• SNIA also growing in Brazil. If you speak Portuguese, check http://www.snia.com.br/

Session: Clouds, Convergence and Consolidation by Henry Baltazar, The 451 Group. http://www.the451group.com/

• Where is the innovation? Cloud Storage Service, Hybrid Cloud Storage (on premises cloud gateway appliance)
• Hybrid Cloud Storage Examples: Bottomless NAS Gateway, Disaster Recovery Appliance, Primary Storage Replacement
• Convergence of Storage/Server/Network into super silos.
• FCoE right now only in limited use cases: Server to SAN connectivity "top-of-rack", Storage target conectivity.
• Solid State Storage - the driver is to close the Storage Performance "gap". Spinning drives not improving fast enough.
• SSD: Is MLC the key? Overcoming write endurance limitations. 3x more affordable than SLC. Enterprise ready?
• Where to deploy SSD? Server (PCI-E cards), Storage (embedded in the array), Network (bump in the wire cache)
• Storage vendors are now using more powerful CPUs and running apps on the storage systems themselves

Session: Long Term Information Retention by Sam Fineberg, HP

• If we want to keep data for 50 or 100 years we are talking going beyond the life span of any storage technology
• Disaster, human error, attacks, economic/organizational faults, media/hardware/software/format obsolescence, losing context
• A good archive is always in motion. You can't stuck a tape in a vault and expect to read it in 50 years.
• What's important in a book? The words in it, the paper it's made of, the political context of when it was written?
• Storage formats. We can't predice the future. Key properties: Self contained, Self describing, Extensible.
• SNIA's SIRF (Self Contained Information Retention Format) and Preservations Objects. http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2009/presentations/tuesday/Fineberg-Cohen_LTRFormat.pdf

Session: Solid State Storage Panel Discussion: “Is Solid State Storage Ready for Primetime?”
Tom Coughlin (Moderator), Coughlin Associates; Marty Czekalski, Seagate; Jim Handy, Objective Analysis; Dr. Easen Ho, Calypso Systems, Inc; Esther Spangler, Smart Modular

• Tom Coughlin
  • Looking at cost trends for flash memory and hard disk drives.
  • Historic symbiotic relationship between flash and HDDs in consumer devices
  • Symbiotic combination of Flash memory and HDDs in computers
  • Calypso SSD Blind Survey 2010. Comparing SLC, MLC and HDD. http://calypsotesters.com/testing.html
  • Flash Use: consumer applications, USB sticks. LA new cache layer? Use some flash or more DRAM for caching?
  • Hetzler’s Chasm Cache Analysis (S. Hetzler, IBM). Two chasms: DRAM-SATA, SATA-Tape. http://www.caiss.org/docs/DinnerSeminar/TheStorageChasm20090205.pdf
  • Dual drive (tiering on your computer – Marvell, Hitachi, Toshiba) and hyrid HDD (Seagate) approaches
  • Dual drive: How much SDD do you need to storage your applications? 40GB is enough. User data goes to a HDD.
  • Hybrid drives, totally transparent to the OS. Putting items you access more often on the SSD. Boot gets faster multiple reboots.
  • Options: Flash Cache Module, Solid State Drive, Solid State Hybrid Drive.
  • Hytachi-LG HyDrive – Optical disk with flash memory drive for dual storage laptops. http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/31/hitachi-lg-goes-official-with-hydrive-ssd-equipped-optical-driv/
  • HDD: Latency issues. Uses DRAM or flash memory for cache? Intel likes flash and hard drives. Seagate likes hybrid drives.
• Jim Handy
  • The DRAM/HDD Speed Gap chart: Tape, HDD, DRAM, L3, L2, L1 – Price per GB vs. Bandwidth in MBps (logarithmic scale)
  • Options: Keep more data in DRAM (more RAM, more servers) or use accelerated HDDs to fill the gap ($300, short-stroked)
  • In 2004 NAND shot past DRAM’s price per GB. 1/12th the cost now and growing. NAND is slower/cheaper than DRAM and faster than a HDD.
  • Yesterday, Violin announced a 40TB SSD. “Put the whole database into flash!” $16 per GB and $3 per IOPS. http://www.violin-memory.com/news/press-releases/violin-memory-quadruples-data-center-density-with-40tb-capacity-flash-memory-array/
  • Automatic Tier Management: autonomous (controllers) or operating system support. Many more to come!
  • Performance muse be understood. Performance is not always intuitive
  • PC: 1 HDD, no hierarchy, speed is nice to have. Data Center: thousands of HDD, storage hierarchy, speed is money
  • PC architectures will follow the data center example. Main storage cached by flash. It’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when.
• Panel discussion

Session: Interoperability Tools for CIFS/SMB/SMB2 by Paul Long and Simon Sun, Microsoft

• [MS-FSSO] is great place for an overview of file-related protocols. Great place to start.
• You can also use the MSDN support forums
• Network Monitor
  • Parsers updated monthly. You can modify/add parsers.
  • Conversation tree is nice.
  • Rich filtering and colorization of frames.
  • Frame annotations
• Network monitor. Four sources of captures
  • GUI Capture from NDIS capture driver
  • NMcap / command line tool to enable/disable capture from a batch file
  • Pcap file format – import captures from other tools like tcpdump, wireshark
  • Event Tracing for Windows. Using netsh trace, logman. Can capture during reboot.
• Netmon API. Can be used for capture or parsing (what is the SMB command in this frame?)
• Experts / Top users / Top protocols / SSL decrypt / ...
• Interoperability Test Suite
• Captures to help you understand with annotations, reference to doc pointer - http://sysdoccap.codeplex.com 
• Look for the file sharing system docs
• Why reviewing packets against the protocol specification if netmon can do the first pass for you?
• Parsers error will point to frames with issues. Also look at SMBerrors
• There cloud be errors in the parsers, but most of the time…
• Can also help you locate the protocol document doc based on a trace. Option to Go to data type definition
• Spec explorer: Use a model to create tests: start with spec, create implementation from spec, write tests to check conformance
• Model used to generate tests – provide input and check expected output
• Hand create model, not test: Spec explorer handles model/input/output
• Interop test suite:
  • Validate protocol doc aginst windows implementation. Verify conformance/accuracy/usability of protocol doc
  • Interop test: see http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/appliedinterop
• Netmon vs wireshark
  • Netmon: parsers are very complete, focus on applications, can capture multiple NICs
  • Wireshark: more feature rich in general,  more focused on lower layers
• Interop test suite: Intent to release source code in a VHD in the future. No specific timeline yet. Working on it.

Session: SMB Traffic Analyzer - Monitor the Data Flow of Samba Servers, Holger Hetterich, Novell

Session: Evaluating SMB2 Performance for Home Directory Workloads by David Kruse and Dan Lovinger, Microsoft

• Options: Performance counters, network captures, windows perform ance analysis tool
• Answering deeper questions. Am I storage, network or CPU bound? Am I seeing a high level of lock contention?
• Event-based model – Log Request, Gather execution info, Log Response + Execution Info
• Execution slicing
• Data mining
• Analyzing an FSCT run to look at local handle count across time, seconds per operation for each type of request
• Evaluating the HomeFolders workload of the File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT)
• Describing FSCT. Overview of the tool, history of its development, details about how it simulates a workload.
• Homefolders: User follows a frequency distribution of scenarios, with ~1 scenario every 11 seconds.
• Capacity metric: How many users the server can satisfy without overload (delayed scenarios)
• Initial Physical Model: Client (SMB RDR), SMB Server, Storage Stack, Disk Subsystem. Track what happens at each level.
• Model with compounding: 1 packet with multiple operations. Latency equation taken that into consideration
• Measuring HomeFolders: SMB 2.1 total wire operations per FSCT scenario.
• SMB Investigation: Modeling of Directory Cache Improvements vs. Directory Leases. Second one seems much better.
• Latency Estimates;
  • Use the model to extrapolate to real hardware.
  • FSCT used to load low-end reference server, captured counters at near overload.
  • High Variance. Some large tails on the CREATE operation
• Scaled scenarios. Extrapolate from LAN to WAN by adding 2-20ms client-server network latency
• These are purely investigations, but shows how a performance model like this can be useful.
  • Consider performance counters and events in your design process
  • New protocols are opportunities to revisit your performance infrastructure
  • More data = More insight = Better designs, earlier
  • Extrapolation models can be an interesting input to the design process

Session: Scaling Likewise-CIFS Beyond 50k Concurrent Connections on a Single Node, by Gerald Carter, Likewise Software

• Likewise as defined by Gerald: “Interoperability platform for non-Microsoft clients and servers in Microsoft OS dominated networks.” http://www.likewiseopen.org
• Gerald quotes on performance:

• “No one cares about performance until it’s not there.”
• “Workloads, much like people, are rarely objective.”

If you are registered for the event, get the decks from http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2010/presentation

For everyone else, the decks are typically made available to the public a few months after the event. I’ll make sure to blog about it when it happens.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) hosted the 8th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) earlier this year. As usual, Microsoft was the underwriter of the CIFS/SMB/SMB2 PlugFest, which was co-located with the SDC event.

For developers working with storage-related technologies, this event gathers a unique crowd and includes a rich agenda. Key industry players were represented and offered presentations. It’s always worth reminding you that the SDC presentations were usually delivered to developers by the actual product development teams and frequently the actual developer of the technology either delivered the presentation or was in the room to take questions. That kind of deep insight is not common in every conference out there.

Microsoft presentations this year included:

SNIA has now released the content publicly, including video recordings for many of the talks. Check these and other presentations (all with slides and many with video recordings) at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2011/2011presentations

If you like the content, be sure to mark your calendars for next year’s SDC 2012. It’s always a great event and the details are already out at http://www.snia.org/about/calendar/2012-storage-developer-conference

The Microsoft TechEd 2012 North America conference is happening this week in Orlando, FL. As part of that event, a number of partners are showing their hardware and/or software at the exhibit area called the TechExpo.

I have spent some time there and took a few pictures of a few partners that have solutions related to the File Server or SMB 3.0 (storage, networking, servers). I tried to capture the signage on each booth, but you need to click on each picture to see a larger version of it.

Chelsio www.chelsio.com
DataOn www.dataonstorage.com
EMC www.emc.com
Fujitsu www.fujitsu.com
Hitachi www.hds.com
HP www.hp.com
IBM www.ibm.com
Intel www.intel.com
LSI www.lsi.com
Mellanox www.mellanox.com
NetApp www.netapp.com
Quanta www.quantaqct.com
RAID Inc. www.raidinc.com
Violin Memory www.violin-memory.com
X-IO www.x-io.com

A big THANKS to each and every one of them for their hard work with Windows Server 2012. There are more partners at the expo, but I did not have time to visit them all. Sorry if I missed your booth.

If you're attending the event, a reminder that the TechExpo will be open tomorrow from 10:30 AM to 2:00 PM.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is hosting the 9th Storage Developer Conference (SDC) in the Hyatt Regency in beautiful Santa Clara, CA (Silicon Valley) on the week of September 17th. As usual, Microsoft is underwriting the SMB/SMB2/SMB3 Plugfest, which is co-located with the SDC event.

For developers working with storage-related technologies, this event gathers a unique crowd and includes a rich agenda that you can find at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2012/agenda2012.  All the key industry players are represented. It lists presentations from Arista, Cleversafe, Dell, EMC, Fusion-io, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Micron, Microsoft, NEC, NetApp, Oracle, Pure Storage, Red Hat, Samba Team, Seagate, Spectra Logic, SwiftTest, Tata, Wipro and many others.

It’s always worth reminding you that the SDC presentations are usually delivered to developers by the actual product development teams and frequently the actual developer of the technology is either delivering the presentation or is in the room to take questions. That kind of deep insight is not common in every conference out there.

Presentations by Microsoft this year include:

Registration is open at http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2012/registration and you should definitely plan to attend. If you are registered, leave a comment and let’s plan to meet when we get there!