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Visuality Systems and Microsoft expand SMB collaboration to storage systems

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Last week, Microsoft and Visuality Systems announced an expanded collaboration on SMB. Visuality is well known for their work supporting the SMB protocol in embedded devices. If you own a printer or scanner that supports the SMB protocol, there’s a good chance that device is running Visuality’s software. Visuality is now expanding into the storage device market.

This new Visuality product offers an SMB implementation that will be appealing to anyone working on a non-Windows device that offers storage, but wants to avoid spending time and effort building their own SMB protocol stack. This could be useful for a wide range of projects, from a small network attached storage device to a large enterprise storage array. Visuality’s SMB implementation includes everything a developer needs to interact with other devices running any version of the SMB protocol, including SMB3.

But why is SMB so important? Well, it’s one of the most widely adopted file protocols and the recent SMB3 version is very fast and reliable. SMB3 is popular on client side, with clients included in Windows (Windows 8 or later), Mac OS X (version 10.10 Yosemite or later) and Linux. Beyond the traditional file server scenarios, SMB3 is now also used in virtualization (Hyper-V over SMB) and databases (SQL Server over SMB) with server implementations in Windows Server (2012 or later), NetApp (Data ONTAP 8.2 or later), EMC (VNX, Isilon OneFS 7.1.1 or later) and Samba (version 4.1 or later), just to mention a few.

For a detailed description of the SMB protocol, including the SMB3 version, check out the SNIA Tutorial on the subject, available from https://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/TomTalpey_SMB3_Remote_File_Protocol-fast15final-revision.pdf.

Read more the Microsoft/Visuality partnership at https://news.microsoft.com/2016/04/11/visuality-systems-and-microsoft-expand-server-message-block-collaboration-to-storage-systems/. You can also get details on the Visuality NQ products at https://www.visualitynq.com/.