DAFS technology demonstrations have been shown at a number of venues since June 2001, including:
DAFS Collaborative Developer Conference, Orlando, June 18, 2001
Oracle Open World, Berlin, June 18-22, 2001
Intel Developer Forum, San Jose, August 27-30, 2001
InfiniBand Trade Association Solutions Conference, Los Angeles, November 7-8, 2001
Oracle Open World, San Francisco, December 3-5, 2001
DAFS Collaborative Sixth Developer Conference

At the sixth Developer Conference, members of the DAFS Collaborative demonstrated various DAFS implementations. Companies involved in the demonstrations included: Broadband Storage, Duke University, Emulex, Fujitsu, Harvard University, IBM DB2, Network Appliance, Troika, and the University of British Columbia.

The Broadband Storage demonstration focused on using the DAFS protocol to support standard kernel mode I/O. The demonstration showed a Broadband Storage NAS device connected by Fibre Channel to an application server running a kernel DAFS implementation, which allows unmodified applications to take advantage of the capabilities offered by running DAFS over a high-performance, low overhead network.

The Fujitsu demonstration showed high-performance data transfer by DAFS, using a Linux-based DAFS client and server, connected via Emulex cLAN network solutions.

The Duke University demonstration shows a DAFS client and a DAFS-compliant memory-based file server, running over Emulex cLAN network solutions on FreeBSD. The demonstration showed the power and performance of the DAFS asynchronous data transfer model and direct user-level I/O for applications. The DAFS client allows direct I/O from applications based on an external I/O toolkit (TPIE) developed at Duke. The TPIE toolkit supports a range of applications including analysis programs for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) processing on massive terrain grids. This is an early demonstration of a reference DAFS implementation for open-source systems such as Linux and FreeBSD. The FreeBSD support is jointly developed by research groups at Duke and Harvard Universities.

The University of British Columbia has implemented a kernel level DAFS server in the Linux kernel using Emulex cLAN network solutions with modified versions of the SDK test clients. This solution demonstrates the functionality of persistent locks and auto-recoverable locks surviving client crashes.

The Network Appliance demonstrations showed a kernel DAFS implementation on a Solaris-based database server running IBM DB2 getting high-performance file service from a NetApp filer. The demonstration showed two transport scenarios: a Fibre Channel fabric using Troika VI/FC HBAs and a Brocade FC switch; and a Gigabit Ethernet interconnect using the Emulex GN9000/VI VI/IP host bus adapters. The resulting CPU, memory and network efficiency were monitored using Quest Software monitoring tools.