Common Internet File System (CIFS)
SearchStorage, Thursday, May 30th, 2024
Common Internet File System (CIFS) is a protocol that gained popularity around Year 2000 as vendors worked to establish an Internet Protocol-based file-sharing protocol.
At its peak, CIFS was supported by OSes such as Windows, Linux and Unix. CIFS used the client-server programming model in which a client program makes a request of a server program -- usually in another computer -- to access a file or pass a message to a program that runs in the server computer. The server takes the requested action and returns a response.
CIFS is now considered obsolete because most modern data storage systems use the more robust Server Message Block (SMB) 2.0 and 3.0 file-sharing protocols. These were major upgrades to CIFS.
CIFS/SMB and the Network File System (NFS) are the two major protocols used in network-attached storage (NAS) systems.