CHAPTER 3 ■ PHYSICAL BACKUP MEDIA
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the overall potential transfer rates of data from clients to servers. CIFS is almost exclusively used only in
Windows environments; however, many UNIX and Linux implementations optionally provide the freely
available software package, Samba, which allows these platforms to access file shares (and other
services) based on SMB.
As a counterpoint, the NFS is almost the complete opposite of CIFS. NFS uses a natively developed
protocol, in conjunction with standard remote procedure call (RPC) methodology, to facilitate the
presentation of file systems to remote clients. NFS is almost exclusively the domain of UNIX and Linux
operating systems; NFS clients are available commercially for Windows, but are very rarely ...