Deployment Guide

15 Dell EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition Storage Overview
6.6 CIFS
Common Internet File System (CIFS) is a file-based storage system based on SMB. SMB is a shared storage
protocol typically used in Microsoft environments for file sharing. Windows-based file shares rely on CIFS as
the transfer protocol of the file level data. File-based storage relies on an underlying files system such as
FAT32, XFS, NTFS or otherwise which differs from block-based storage which does not. File level storage is
an excellent medium for some applications but is not traditionally effective in others. When an application
needs direct block access to disk file-based storage is not appropriate. Deployments that fall into this category
include some databases and most Operating Systems.