A Trace-Based Study of SMB Network File System Workloads in an Academic Enterprise

Storage system traces are important for examining real-world applications, studying potential bottlenecks, as well as driving benchmarks in the evaluation of new system designs. While file system traces have been well-studied in earlier work, it has been some time since the last examination of the SMB network file system. The purpose of this work is to continue previous SMB studies to better understand the use of the protocol in a real-world production system in use at the University of Connecticut. The main contribution of our work is the exploration of I/O behavior in modern file system workloads as well as new examinations of the inter-arrival times and run times for I/O events. We further investigate if the recent standard models for traffic remain accurate. Our findings reveal interesting data relating to the number of read and write events. We notice that the number of read and write events is significantly less than creates and the average number of bytes exchanged per I/O is much smaller than what has been seen in previous studies. Furthermore, we find an increase in the use of metadata for overall network communication that can be taken advantage of through the use of smart storage devices.