The SNIA Storage Developer Conference is held every September in sunny Santa Clara, CA and is attended by almost every file protocol developer in the world. All the geeks that do my job (SMB file server development) at all the major OS manufacturers (Microsoft, Apple, NetApp) get together to talk about odd bugs, watch presentations, and actually test interoperability in SMB lab.
The benefit of this event is 3-fold:
- Networking with other professionals
- Testing client/server interaction with the developers who wrote the stack, and can fix the bugs immediately.
- Thoughtful, informative, presentations of past and future technology.
While you have to attend to get the first two, access to the presentations has just been made available online by SNIA. In addition to the slide decks, several key presentations were recorded as well. All PDF and streaming videos are available at:
http://www.snia.org/events/storage-developer2011/2011presentations
On the SMB front, I personally recommend the talk
SMB 2.2: Bigger. Faster. Scalier. by David Kruse and Matthew George of Microsoft. Going into the details is a whole separate post, but I will say Microsoft has decided to be engineers again and implement some truly innovative features in their file protocol.
