If your PACS is pulling images off of Windows/CIFS Shares using SMB protocol you have A LOT to gain in performance from Microsoft’s SMBv2.

SMBv2…
  1. Less chatty.
  2. supports larger buffer sizes.
  3. Has increased support for more open files and shares.
  4. Is more resiliant to network glitches.
  5. Supports symbolic links.

SMBv2 operates only between Vista and Longhorn boxes with compatibility and inferior performance with lesser versions of SMB, this includes SAMBA and legacy XP/2003 or lower Microsoft products.

WHY POST THIS HERE?

Simple Point, Listen or Don’t. If you are looking at solutions for managing your PACS images and rely on this protocol, either with Samba in embedded devices (appliances) or unix based systems with Fast Connect or Samba, realize that you will not benefit this performance increase in the protocol unless vendors are positioned to play with it. Even Samba is behind the eight ball here in interoperability and quite frankly the developers may release samba under GPLv3, since Novell pissed them off and this may stunt forward development for most vendors who built their appliances and products with SMBv1 to play ball with SMBv2.

Of course, if you can manage to get your PACS to Vista/Longhorn level, your image delivery speeds will increase dramatically.
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