Common Internet File System and Server Message Block (CIFS/SMB)

Don’t let distance disrupt your Windows applications. Silver Peak software accelerates CIFS/SMB, the protocol underlying Windows file sharing. Files open 90 percent faster and consume 50-times less bandwidth. Servers can be centralized and files shared without impacting the user’s quality of experience. With Silver Peak, enterprise networks are made more efficient and cost-effective, no matter how far users are from their servers.

CIFS/SMB was originally introduced by IBM in the 1980s and popularized by Microsoft as the core file sharing mechanism for the Windows operating system. Today, the protocol can also be found in numerous environments. CIFS/SMB has been through several releases with the most current version, SMB 3.0, available in Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

While effective within the office, CIFS/SMB performance degrades across distance. Early versions of the protocol were particularly “chatty,” requiring several client-server exchanges to complete a single operation. As such, CIFS/SMB was highly susceptible to latency and network congestion problems, which are particularly common to large scale, shared networks such as the Internet. In addition, the files shared with CIFS/SMB often consume a significant amount of bandwidth. Later versions of CIFS/SMB include significant performance improvements, but continue to struggle across distance.

Silver Peak addresses the major performance challenges of running any version of CIFS/SMB across the WAN for small or large organizations without additional hardware, plug-ins, or tweaking of the Silver Peak software:

• Bandwidth – Silver Peak byte-level deduplication removes redundant CIFS/SMB data from the WAN. The first time data is sent from the WAN, it is fingerprinted and compressed by Silver Peak. Subsequent requests are fulfilled from the local Silver Peak instance.
• Latency – Silver Peak mitigates latency enabling CIFS/SMB to operate more efficiently over distance. CIFS Acceleration includes CIFS read-ahead, CIFS write-behind, and CIFS metadata optimizations TCP Acceleration includes windows scaling, selective acknowledgements, and HighSpeed TCP. Latency is also reduced through packet coalescing, which re-packages multiple smaller packets into a single larger one, and Dynamic Path Control, which selects the fastest path to a remote location.
• Congestion – Silver Peak eliminates the effects of congestion, making CIFS/SMB performance more predictable by recovering lost packets and resequencing out-of-order packets in real-time, avoiding retransmission delays. Dynamic Path Control identifies the optimum path to a remote location. Traffic shaping and QoS mechanisms ensure CIFS/SMB receives the necessary bandwidth.

Silver Peak also protects CIFS/SMB data in transit with Accelerated IPSec, the fastest way to secure traffic site-to-site.  All of this is done to scale, improving application performance from small offices to large data centers, making Silver Peak software the most scalable data acceleration platform in the industry.