topic Re: Moving away from CIFS in Network and Storage Protocols

Moving away from CIFS

brettly11 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:03:10 GMT

Hi All,

I am very new to NetApp and have a dedicated FAS2240 in a managed environment in a data center. Currently I have one shelf with 24 600k drives and need to expand. As i am looking into it, I am contemplating moving away from CIFS and wanted to see if there were any significant reasons NOT to. Any advice/information is much appreciated.

Regards,
Brett

Re: Moving away from CIFS

vims — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:18:00 GMT

Hi Brett,

I am trying to correlate your expansion of controller and moving away from CIFS. CIFS is the protocol and it depends on your tasks / environment / clients how you want to serve them.. CIFS is primarily for windows users, NFS - Unix etc....

Re: Moving away from CIFS

STOREJO7 — Mon, 13 May 2013 08:27:16 GMT

Hi Brett,

If you are using the storage for file-sharing, in a Windows environment, you will HAVE TO use CIFS.

If you are also using the storage for other applications (block data), you can utilize the storage over FC or iSCSI.

Also, in the FAS22xx family, all the protocol licenses are bundled with the storage system.

Therefore, you don't need to buy any additional licenses as well.

And you can expand the storage system, irrespective of the protocols deployed.

Also, for file-sharing, if you have less number of concurrent users,

you can use SATA HDDs for the same.