How is a NetApp volume different from a CIFS/SMB share?

• A. A share is a storage container on disk; a volume is a network path created from a volume.
• B. A volume is a storage container on disk; a share (CIFS/SMB) is a network-accessible path created from a volume.
• C. A volume and a share are the same concept.
• D. A share is only used with NFS.

Answer: (B)

The main idea here is what each object represents in NetApp ONTAP. A volume is the storage container on disk that holds your data and is the unit you manage for capacity, quotas, snapshots, and replication. A CIFS/SMB share, on the other hand, is a network path created from that volume to expose a directory to clients over the SMB protocol. In practice, you create a volume to store files, and inside that volume you create one or more SMB shares that map to specific directories, such as /vol/vol_sales/reports, which would be accessed by clients as \storage\reports. You can have many shares in a single volume, but a share cannot exist without a volume.