Apple moving away from AFP in 10.9 = stay away from ExtremeZ-IP and netatalk

With Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple is moving away from their AFP protocol and making SMBv2 the standard protocol for file sharing. Even Mac to Mac communication will use SMBv2.

This should discourage us from leveraging any products that use the AFP protocol such as ExtremeZ-IP or using the open source Netatalk system. This should also make working with mixed Mac/PC environments easier since SMBv2 should be equal in speed to NFS. So you should be able to transition NFS users to SMB and the permissions complexities of mixed environments should be lessened.

Of course, this is all dependent on the quality of Apple's SMB stack.

Attached is a page from the OS X 10.9 Core Technologies PDF explaining the use of SMBv2. The full document is on Apple's website: http://images.apple.com/osx/preview/docs/OSX_Mavericks_Core_Technology_Overview.pdf

Regarding network Spotlight. Allegedly Apple has supported Spotlight over SMB since 10.7, so this should not change anything, though many people struggle with network spotlight. 3rd party web based asset management products such as the inexpensive Axle Video may be a better alternative.

An article from AFP548 also discusses the move to SMB and it's impact on Mac administrators

AFP548 – Covering Apple IT – SMB2 & You: Saying Goodbye to AFP in OS X Mavericks