The charter of the new DAFS Implementers' Forum will be to: foster a collaborative ecosystem of vendors focused on the delivery of DAFS-based solutions; expand market awareness of DAFS as a storage networking technology; identify and promote the distribution of DAFS reference implementations; engage ISVs and customers on requirements for DAFS integration into data center applications; plan and demonstrate the interoperability of DAFS solutions on relevant transports; and determine the need and appropriate venue for further technical progress on DAFS-related APIs.

The co-chairs of the DAFS Implementers' Forum will be the current co-chairs of the DAFS Collaborative, David Dale from Network Appliance, and Jim Pappas from Intel.

"We are enthusiastic about the promise of DAFS in helping the industry build more powerful and interoperable data centers, particularly when DAFS is combined with next-generation I/O technologies such as the InfiniBand architecture," said Jim Pappas, co-chair of the DAFS Collaborative and director of initiative marketing for Intel's Enterprise Platform Group. "Intel is pleased to take a leading role in the next stage of this important storage technology initiative."

"DAFS holds the promise of being a key technology of the eBusiness datacenter. Its role is confirmed, a standard is born, and now it is time to get on with productization and interoperability. This is where SNIA comes in," says Michael Peterson, President of Strategic Research and the founder and past President of SNIA. "I'm very pleased to see the DAFS Collaborative moving the next stage of work into SNIA. We created SNIA to unify the industry and it has been immensely successful."

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 architecture 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. DAFS is expected to be a key enabling technology for a new generation of high-performance, highly scalable, high-density data centers.