First Results of Oracle's Participation in DAFS Collaborative

Woodside, CA - June 18, 2001 --

The DAFS Collaborative today announced that Network Appliance will demonstrate DAFS technology at the Oracle Open World conference beginning in Berlin today. This demonstration is the first result of Oracle's participation in the DAFS Collaborative, an industry group established to specify and promote a new protocol for high-performance, shared file access in data center environments. DAFS is expected to be a foundation technology for building a new generation of data centers that are more flexible, reliable, and interoperable, yet significantly less complex.

The demonstration shows Oracle's 9i database system accessing data files stored on a Network Appliance filer over a fibre channel link using the DAFS protocol. DAFS was transparently integrated with Oracle 9i using the new Oracle Disk Management (ODM) interface.

"Oracle created the ODM interface to enable hardware and software vendors to integrate their products with the 9i database. We made the ODM spec available to the DAFS Collaborative to ensure that the DAFS protocol takes advantage of the performance and manageability features exposed by the ODM interface," said Bill Bridge, Architect, Cluster and Parallel Storage Technology for Oracle Corporation. "We are delighted to see the first fruits of our DAFS Collaborative activity in this demo."

The DAFS protocol is a new file access protocol, specifically designed to take advantage of standard memory-to-memory interconnect technologies such as VI (the Virtual Interface Architecture) and InfiniBand in clustered data center environments. DAFS enables applications to access network interface hardware without operating system intervention, and carry out bulk data transfers directly to or from application buffers with minimal CPU overhead. The result is low-latency, high-performance shared file access between application servers or database servers and network-attached storage devices, connected via Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet or InfiniBand fabrics. DAFS is expected to be a key enabling technology for a new generation of high-performance, highly-scalable, high-density data centers. "Last summer, we set out to create the DAFS protocol Spec within a year in an open industry forum," said Werner Glinka, executive director the DAFS Collaborative. "We are pleased to have Oracle's participation in our effort, and we expect to release v1.0 of the Spec in July, right on schedule."