SMB 3.0 Certification for NAS Devices

Q: Is there a specific SMB 3.0 certification for NAS devices?

A: There's no SMB 3.0-specific certification for NAS devices. SMB 3.0 was first introduced in Windows Server 2012, which enabled many features such as transparent failover, scale out, multichannel, encryption, and more, allowing SMB 3.0 to be used by enterprise workloads such as Hyper-V and SQL Server. Look for devices that support SMB 3.0 (or SMB 3.02, which is the Windows Server 2012 R2 update to SMB 3.0). In addition, pay attention to the specific aspects of SMB 3.0 that are supported. For example, I've seen several NAS devices that support SMB 3.0 but don't support scale out. Vendors can attend Microsoft plugfest events, which helps with device testing and specific protocol suite tests. However, no specific SMB certification exists.