If you’ve run the SMB protocol, my name may be familiar. Every Microsoft document you read, every announcement you saw, every feature you configured in the past decade, all came from yours truly – Ned Pyle.
For twelve years at Microsoft, I was the Principal Program Manager and owner of one of the most-used data protocols in the world, running on more than a billion Windows devices, virtual machines, storage arrays, and in every public cloud. I built innovative technologies, security options, performance and reliability features, and broke with Windows tradition by eliminating unsafe legacies; the end of SMB1 is one of my claims to fame.
And with all that in the bag, I decided to start a new chapter. My choice was obvious: Tuxera.
I’d known Tuxera for years, they’ve been a Microsoft partner and patent licensee since 2012 and make a variety of storage technologies. Tuxera engineers built Fusion File Share, a remarkable SMB server for Linux. Unlike the rest of the storage industry, where SMB implementations often trail years behind Microsoft or meet only the bare protocol requirements, Fusion File Share is state of the art. It supports compression, multichannel, SMB on RDMA, encryption, and scale-out file server just like the latest offers from Microsoft. Fusion has tremendous performance with its multithreaded architecture that allows it to fully utilize the hardware it’s running on. And because it’s commercial software, Fusion benefits from dedicated and expert support with real service level agreements, not forum posts and outsourcing.
Crucially, Fusion can also do things I never could in Windows – like run in a Kubernetes container, or in ridiculously small embedded systems and at a massive high availability scale. Its platform grants more security and less overhead – not because Linux is inherently safer or more efficient code than Windows, but because you can disassemble Linux. When you run Windows, you can’t remove what you don’t need, and that means you can’t reduce its attack surface or footprint. Even the Server Core version of Windows still has vast numbers of services, APIs, binaries that you can’t get rid of. It adds up to more risk, higher costs, and more things that can go wrong every Patch Tuesday.
Linux, as we all know, is the server of the future. While Windows Server usage is massive, Linux is greater still and growing. The clouds, the devices, the containers, and the backends of the world will be dominated by Linux for decades to come. But the clients, the users, and the front-end applications will be on Windows and Macs connected to Active Directory. The tie that binds them all will be SMB. And Fusion File Share will be the right option for when you want them all working together seamlessly, with the best performance, the highest reliability, the best security, at any scale. Fusion won’t just be a fast follower of Windows; it will drive innovation in the file server industry.
I wanted to be a part of that. That’s why I said farewell to Microsoft and came to Tuxera.
And as for the alternatives, well, they can’t beat Fusion’s performance.
