WHITEPAPER

Sharing data with incompatible protocols

How Tuxera Fusion brings SMB and NFS together on Linux storage

Windows and macOS clients share files over SMB, while Linux servers and most HPC and AI training clusters run on NFS. Most mature organizations need both, against the same data. The common answer to SMB and NFS multi-protocol access is to keep a separate file server for each protocol and pay for the storage twice.

The open-source route pairs Samba, the open-source SMB server for Linux, with Ganesha or NFSD. Each server keeps its own lock table and its own view of permissions, so an NFS client cannot see a write lock taken over SMB and can truncate or overwrite the file. Windows ACLs and NFSv4 ACLs have to be managed twice. Commercial multi-protocol support does exist, but it ships inside proprietary storage platforms.

This white paper explains how Tuxera Fusion runs Fusion SMB and Fusion NFS as two protocol heads on one shared user-mode VFS. A lock or handle taken over one protocol is visible to the other, and each user has a single identity that SMB clients see as a Windows ACL and NFS clients see as an NFSv4 ACL. It also covers MLPerf Storage 2.0 results, in which Fusion SMB kept 15 H100 GPUs above 90% accelerator utilization on a single 200GbE port, and a customer that replaced 11 Samba servers with 4 Fusion nodes.

Access this white paper to see how Fusion delivers SMB and NFS multi-protocol on commodity Linux storage, and what consolidation does to server count and three-year cost.