Woodside, CA - December 11, 2000 -- The DAFS Collaborative, an industry group established to specify and promote the Direct Access File System (DAFS) protocol today announced that their third Developers Conference will be held on January 23 in Boston, MA.

This announcement comes on the heels of a successful second Developers Conference, held last week in Burlingame, CA. At the conference, a new version of the DAFS Software Development Kit (SDK) was made available. The new SDK includes support for RDMA operations and a test program which enables developers to establish a basic VI connection between client and server, and test simple DAFS operations. Written with rapid prototyping in mind, the SDK will enable hardware and software vendors to get hands-on experience with the new protocol as it evolves. The SDK is available for download from www.DAFScollaborative.org.

With more than 50 companies actively participating in the DAFS Spec development effort, technical contribution is divided among four Working Groups focused on APIs, High Availability, Transport, and File System issues. Leaders for each of the working groups were recently appointed to identify priorities, and drive issues to consensus resolution.

Tracy Edmonds, Vice President, Controller Division, Troika Networks is leading the APIs Working Group; Paul Massiglia, Technical Director, VERITAS Software is leading the High Availability Working Group; Dave Wells, Director Business Development, Giganet Inc is leading the Transport WG; and Mark Wittle, Technical Staff, Network Appliance is leading the File System Working Group. Significant progress was made at the Developers Conference towards meeting milestones on the DAFS Spec development roadmap, where feature development initiatives are divided into distinct phases to allow for rapid progress on the Spec, while at the same time enabling DAFS Collaborative members to proceed with their own product implementations. Future milestones include an interoperability event in Q2CY01, and the completion of Version 1.0 of the Spec by Q3CY01.

"The availability of an SDK and test program, which tracks the progress being made on the DAFS protocol spec, is an excellent prototyping tool for ISV's that don't want to be left behind by this fast-moving development effort," said Mitch Shults, Director of Business Development for Intel's Fabric Components Division and Co-Chair of the DAFS Collaborative. "Our goal is to create a file access protocol specification which takes advantage of the next-generation system interconnects, scheduled for delivery next year."

The DAFS Collaborative encourages broad industry participation. Additional participants are welcome and can join online. For more information visit www.DAFScollaborative.org.