Why SMB on DAOS Changes Everything for Media & Entertainment

If you run post-production infrastructure, you already know the compromise: you can have fast storage, or you can have storage your editors can actually mount. Rarely both.

Parallel filesystems like Lustre and GPFS deliver raw throughput, but they don't speak SMB natively. Your editors on macOS and Windows can't just open Finder or Explorer and start cutting. You end up deploying gateway nodes, NFS bridges, or forcing artists onto Linux workstations — none of which is ideal when you're racing a delivery deadline.

Traditional NAS from NetApp, Dell/Isilon, or QNAP gives you SMB out of the box, but performance hits a wall. When a dozen editors are pulling 8K ProRes streams simultaneously while the VFX team ingests volumetric capture data and renders queue overnight, legacy NAS architectures simply can't keep up. You either over-provision hardware or accept that someone is always waiting.

That's the gap the Enakta Storage Platform now fills — with SMB support developed in partnership with Tuxera.

DAOS Performance, SMB Simplicity

The Enakta Storage Platform is built on DAOS (Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage), the open-source engine that holds the top positions across the IO500 global benchmark. DAOS bypasses the kernel entirely with user-space I/O over RDMA, delivering throughput that conventional storage architectures physically cannot match.

But raw performance means nothing if your creative team can't access it. That's why we did extensive development work with Tuxera to natively integrate their SMB server directly on top of DAOS. This isn't an SMB gateway sitting in front of storage — the Tuxera SMB server runs natively on the Enakta Storage Platform, talking directly to DAOS's object layer to squeeze out maximum performance with no protocol translation overhead.

The integration also brings Tuxera's full suite of advanced SMB capabilities:

• SMB Direct (RDMA) — bypasses the TCP/IP stack entirely, allowing Windows clients to read and write storage over RDMA with minimal CPU overhead and near-wire-speed throughput. For high-resolution video workflows, this is transformative.
• SMB Multichannel — aggregates bandwidth across multiple network interfaces automatically. If your editing workstations have two or more NICs, Multichannel bonds them transparently for higher throughput and failover resilience.

The result: editors on macOS and Windows mount storage via SMB the way they mount any other share — through Finder, Explorer, or their NLE's media browser. Underneath, they get DAOS performance delivered through a purpose-built, natively integrated SMB implementation.

Why This Matters for Post-Production

Modern post-production workflows generate enormous amounts of data and demand consistent, low-latency I/O from multiple clients simultaneously. Here's where the Enakta Storage Platform with SMB by Tuxera changes the equation:

8K and Beyond

A single stream of 8K RAW footage can demand 1–3 GB/s of sustained read throughput. Multiply that by a team of editors, colourists, and compositors all working on the same project, and you need storage that scales linearly with demand. DAOS does exactly that — add nodes, add performance. No single controller bottleneck, no head-of-line blocking.

Volumetric Capture and Virtual Production

LED-wall virtual production stages and volumetric capture rigs generate terabytes per session. The ingest pipeline needs to absorb data at wire speed while editors simultaneously access yesterday's footage for offline editing. With DAOS, reads and writes don't compete for the same I/O path the way they do on traditional filer architectures.

VFX Rendering

Render farms produce thousands of small EXR files per shot. Legacy filesystems choke on the metadata overhead — creating, stat'ing, and closing thousands of files per second is exactly the workload pattern that DAOS was designed to accelerate. The Enakta Storage Platform handles the small-file metadata storm that brings POSIX filesystems to their knees.

Dailies and Review

When the director wants to review yesterday's cuts at 9am, the last thing you want is a storage system that's still recovering from overnight renders. DAOS rebuilds failed nodes in under 10 minutes at network speed — not the 18-hour fsck that legacy systems impose. Your dailies review starts on time, every time.

Why Tuxera

SMB is deceptively complex. The protocol has decades of evolution, dozens of dialect versions, and behaviour that varies across macOS, Windows, and Linux clients. Getting it right — with correct locking semantics, proper macOS resource fork handling, SMB Direct RDMA support, Multichannel negotiation, and consistent performance across client platforms — requires deep protocol expertise.

Tuxera is one of the few companies globally with that depth. Their SMB server isn't built on Samba — it's a clean, purpose-built implementation. We worked closely with their engineering team to integrate it natively with DAOS's object storage semantics, ensuring that every I/O operation takes the shortest path from client to data. The result of that development is an SMB implementation that doesn't just "work on DAOS" — it was engineered specifically to exploit what DAOS does best.

Runs on Whatever You Have

The Enakta Storage Platform runs on NVMe SSDs and standard Linux servers — from plain Ethernet and TCP all the way up to RoCEv2 and InfiniBand with non-blocking fabrics at thousands of nodes. Start with commodity infrastructure and scale into high-performance RDMA networks as your requirements grow. We've already published a 1PB+ reference architecture with Kioxia that delivers up to 200 GiB/s per server — validated and ready for production use.

You're not locked into a single hardware path or vendor upgrade cycle. When faster NVMe drives ship, you swap them in. When you need more capacity, you add nodes. When you need more throughput, upgrade your fabric. Performance scales linearly at every level.

The Old Choice Is Gone

For years, M&E studios have been forced to choose: fast parallel storage that your artists can't mount, or mountable NAS that can't keep up. The Enakta Storage Platform with SMB by Tuxera eliminates that trade-off.

Your editors get the SMB mounts they expect. Your infrastructure gets DAOS performance underneath. Your budget gets commodity hardware economics instead of proprietary filer pricing.

That's not an incremental improvement. It's a different category of storage.