Orlando, FL - June 18, 2001 -- The DAFS Collaborative announced today that it will demonstrate its new high-performance, open-standard networking protocol for the first time at its 6th Developer's Conference, to be held today in Orlando. The demonstrations represent prototype implementations of the Direct Access File System (DAFS) protocol, a broadly supported file access technology that will form part of the foundation for a new generation of data centers. Organizations demonstrating DAFS technology include Broadband Storage, Fujitsu, Duke University, the University of British Columbia, and a group of companies including Brocade, Emulex Corporation, IBM DB2, Network Appliance, Quest Software and Troika.
These prototype solutions represent a number of different implementation approaches running over a variety of transports -- Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Emulex's cLAN. In each demonstration, no changes were required to the basic application in order to take advantage of the high-performance file I/O capabilities of DAFS.
The DAFS protocol is 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 a significant increase in application server CPU cycles available for application processing, together with high-performance, low-latency shared file access between application servers and storage systems, connected by Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, InfiniBand or proprietary interconnects. 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 David Dale, co-chair of the DAFS Collaborative. "These technology demonstrations provide a compelling proof of concept for the DAFS protocol, as we close in on the release of v1.0 of the Spec, scheduled for the end of July."
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