New Tolly Group report on the performance of SMB2

The Tolly Group, Inc. has just released a new 39-page report on the SMB2 performance improvements in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

Title:
Enhanced Network Performance with Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 - Update

Abstract:
With the release of the Windows Vista client operating system and Windows Server 2008 network managers face the prospect of integrating these next-generation operating systems into their current networks alongside computers running Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
To verify the benefits of the improved networking implementation, Microsoft commissioned The Tolly Group to quantify the improvements in the network throughput and task completion time when executing common tasks in a variety of scenarios. Importantly, tests were run using key combinations of legacy and new client and server operating systems to determine benefits available to customers. This paper is an updated version of document 207180 from 2007 which was conducted using a pre-production version of Microsoft code.

Publication date:
14 January 2009

Sponsor:
Microsoft Corporation 

Download URL (requires registration):
https://www.tolly.com/DocDetail.aspx?DocNumber=208306

This is a great study overall and I recommend that you download it and read it carefully. Keep in mind, though, that the portion of the study that focuses on WAN only uses a 1.5 and 10 mbit/sec WAN with 50 msec of latency. It is important to highlight that the performance gains in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are even more dramatic at higher WAN speed and/or higher latency. This happens because SMB2 has an ever larger opportunity to use pipelining when those factors are present.

For instance, the difference between SMB and SMB2 performance is much more pronounced with at 200 msec round trip time than it is with 60 msec of latency, as you can verify at https://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2008/11/11/file-server-performance-improvements-with-the-smb2-protocol-in-windows-server-2008.aspx.