Tuesday June 20, 4:08 pm Eastern Time
Company Press Release
Storage Networking Leaders Collaborate On New File-Access Protocol
SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 20, 2000--
New Method for Direct Access to Storage Improves
Performance for Internet and Enterprise Applications;
Industry Leaders form DAFS Collaborative to Encourage
Industry Cooperation and Address Customer Issues
Network Appliance, Inc. (Nasdaq:NTAP - news), the leading provider of network-attached data access and content management solutions, announced today that it is working with Intel Corporation and Seagate Technology on a new protocol for direct, memory-to-memory file access that will dramatically enhance the performance of Internet, collaborative, e-commerce, and database applications.
The protocol, called Direct Access File System (DAFS), is designed to enable a new generation of high-performance, low-latency storage networks. DAFS establishes new levels of scalability and functionality, as well as the ease of use demanded by today's 24x7 computing environments.
Direct Access File System
High-performance, scalable storage infrastructures that provide low total cost of ownership and cost-effective data management are a primary computing concern. End-to-end Internet content delivery is increasingly vital to businesses and consumers alike. The DAFS technology vision is to employ intelligent storage appliances based on open standards to deliver enterprise-class functionality and features required by time- and mission-critical applications-- at a fraction of the cost of traditional, proprietary mainframe and data center clustering technologies.
DAFS uses the Virtual Interface (VI) architecture as its underlying transport mechanism. VI allows bulk data transfer directly to or from application buffers. VI also allows applications to access VI-capable hardware directly without operating system (OS) intervention. DAFS takes advantage of both these capabilities.
DAFS is especially appealing in heterogeneous data-sharing environments where customers access common pools of highly available data across operating systems. DAFS also provides significant performance improvements compared to other file systems. DAFS allows applications to directly access I/O, resulting in low-latency, low-overhead data sharing that increases system scalability and performance. We estimate that the total performance improvement available from these optimizations will be on the order of 40%, as measured by standard industry benchmarks.
The DAFS Collaborative
Network Appliance also announced today that it is forming a new organization with Intel, Seagate, and industry leaders to make the DAFS protocol available to the industry. The organization is being called the DAFS Collaborative and will solicit industry review and feedback before the new file system is submitted to an appropriate standards body. More information on the specification, industry supporters, and technical detail is available on the group's Web site at www.DAFScollaborative.org.
Industry leaders in this collaborative effort include: Agilent Technologies; Adaptec, Inc.; Ancor Communications, Inc.; ATTO Technology, Inc.; BROCADE; Chaparral Network Storage, Inc.; Cisco Systems; Crossroads Systems; Earthlink; Eurologic Systems; Fujitsu Limited; Gadzoox Networks; Giganet; HighGround Systems; Intel Corporation; Landmark Graphics Corp.; Media 100; NetLedger; Network Appliance, Inc.; Oracle Corporation; QLogic Corporation; Quantum|ATL; Red Hat, Inc.; Seagate; Spectra Logic; StorageNetworks, Inc.; Troika Networks; VA Linux Systems; and Vixel Corporation.
The DAFS group encourages broad industry participation. Additional participants are welcome and can join online at www.DAFScollaborative.org.
The DAFS Collaborative will spend the summer seeking new participants. The first meeting of the DAFS Collaborative will take place later this summer. A separate press release will announce meeting details. Interested parties can register their interest today on the Web site.
Note to Editors: NetApp and the Network Appliance logo are registered trademarks and Network Appliance is a trademark of Network Appliance, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Windows and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark in the U.S. and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.
Editorial Addendum: Industry Quotes
Network Appliance
``Storage systems providing uninterrupted, rapid data access are the number one concern for IT organizations around the world,'' said Mark Santora, senior vice president of marketing at Network Appliance. ``Working with market and technology leaders in storage, networking, and data-intensive applications, we are offering a standards-based approach to simplify overall data management and deployment, make storage more scalable and affordable, and provide lightning-fast performance unmatched by any other technology.''
``Direct Access File System, or DAFS, will be used as the basis for integrating the industry's best applications software, compute server systems, and storage systems into cohesive, scalable, storage networks,'' said Steve Kleiman, chief technology officer at Network Appliance and architect of DAFS. ``DAFS can be particularly important to complex UNIX© and Windows NT© cluster environments, and centralized server storage area networks. DAFS provides the performance advantage of direct application access, while maintaining the data sharing and maintainability advantages of file access protocols.''
Industry Experts
Marc Farley
``Network Appliance has elevated the role of the NAS filer to a key component of Internet systems-site computing,'' according to Marc Farley, author of Building Storage Networks and vice president of marketing with Solution-Soft, developers of appliance application software. ``Their implementation of VI in DAFS is truly visionary and clearly demonstrates their technical leadership in this dynamic industry.''
Jon William Toigo
Says Jon William Toigo, independent storage consultant, trade press writer, and author of the best selling book, The Holy Grail of Data Storage Management, ``DAFS is a major step forward toward the realization of truly open SANs. It bridges the gap between the traditional value proposition of NAS, which enables robust data file sharing via established network file system protocols, and the presently unrealized promise of SANs to provide flexible and scalable block-level storage access within a heterogeneous network of servers and storage devices. DAFS will set the stage for plug-and-play SANs that utilize NAS devices as secure, highly manageable portals into enterprise storage infrastructures.''
Customers
Earthlink
``EarthLink is very excited about the VI/DAFS initiative,'' said Tim Bosserman, systems architect, Earthlink. ``For years we have sought a solution which provides network-attached storage without all the overhead of NFS, which is slowed by the implementation of many features which we never need or use. We expect that the VI/DAFS initiative will give us the high-speed, low-overhead storage alternative that we've always wanted.''
Media 100
``Media 100 has relied on ATTO for years to provide leading-edge storage solutions that meet the high-bandwidth needs of our streaming media production customers,'' said Mike Savello, director of marketing for Media 100. ``We are looking forward to working with ATTO to roll out the DAFS architecture for more efficient network storage and streaming of video data.''
NetLedger
``NetLedger is excited about the opportunity to take advantage of the ability of DAFS to achieve OS independence, transport layer independence, and to separate the management of computer servers and storage. This will greatly improve our ability to manage and scale the information resources of our customers. Importantly, DAFS will help NetLedger efficiently and effectively market new products and services,'' said Dave Durkee, chief information officer of NetLedger, Inc. ``We have already developed an architecture that provides us tremendous flexibility to grow and change with market opportunities and our goal is to serve literally millions of small businesses over the Internet. The DAFS protocol will provide us an additional tool we need to achieve this goal.''
DAFS Collaborative Participants
Adaptec, Inc.
``Adaptec is committed to driving the convergence of storage and networking and recognizes the importance of developing technical standards that enable new storage solutions to reach a broader market. The formation of the DAFS Collaborative is an important step in the evolution of standards for storage subsystems. Adaptec will play an active role in the creation of DAFS and develop solutions that support the new protocol,'' said Jim Comstock, vice president of Storage Networking Solutions for Adaptec.
Agilent Technologies
``Agilent is a leading provider of storage network solutions that maximize system performance for the customer. We support efforts such as these that are aimed at improving performance in this rapidly evolving market,'' said Bob Hansen, strategic business development manager at Agilent Technologies.
Ancor Communications, Inc.
``As the first memory-to-memory file transfer protocol, DAFS will bring a new level of performance to networking,'' said Carla Kennedy, Ancor's vice president of marketing. ``And because DAFS uses Virtual Interface as its underlying transport mechanism, it is InfiniBandSM compliant from the start. As the industry leader with the lowest switch latency, Ancor supports efforts such as DAFS that will make data access faster, increasing end-user productivity.''
ATTO Technology, Inc.
``ATTO Technology, Inc. is a leader in providing streaming data solutions for data-intensive applications such as digital video, tape backup, and digital voice. The DAFS architecture will provide IT professionals with new levels of system scalability and performance for deploying streaming data through networks,'' said Don Bauch, director of marketing for ATTO Technology.
BROCADE
``BROCADE is committed to driving interoperability of standards-based storage area networks,'' said Jack Cuthbert, BROCADE vice president of worldwide marketing. ``We are pleased to work with Network Appliance and support the DAFS Collaborative, which will help our mutual customers take advantage of the combined capabilities of storage area networks and network-attached storage. Using the virtual interface (VI) over Fibre Channel provides a high performance, server to server communications mechanism for storage area networking environments.''
Chaparral Network Storage
``Chaparral supports standards that meet end-users' demands for integrated, interoperable solutions that increase the performance of their storage networks,'' said Bob Morris, vice president of marketing, Chaparral Network Storage, Inc. ``DAFS addresses the important process of blurring the line between NAS and SAN, enabling end-users to benefit from the advanced capabilities of each.''
Cisco Systems
``As a leading provider of IP-based infrastructure solutions, Cisco is committed to supporting standards efforts such as DAFS that provide new capabilities across existing IP networks,'' said Duncan Potter, product line manager, Cisco's Enterprise Workgroup business unit. ``The ability to deploy cost-effective and optimized storage solutions across TCP/IP is a key element in our efforts to provide customers with support for New World applications necessary to the Internet-enabled organization.''
Crossroads Systems
``As the standard in storage routing, Crossroads supports the DAFS initiative for improving access and scalability of data storage,'' said Larry Sanders, president and COO of Crossroads Systems. ``Because of the Virtual Interface transport mechanism, DAFS is well-aligned with Crossroads' efforts as a supporter of VI architecture, member of InfiniBand trade association, and leading developer of InfiniBand products.''
Eurologic Systems
Hans O'Sullivan, chief technology officer of Eurologic Systems, said ``Despite the data transfer speeds enabled by 2Gbit-per-second Fibre Channel, inefficiencies in previous generations of file transfer protocols prevent the significant improvements in system performance promised by Fibre Channel technology. Network Appliance's employment of the Virtual Interface architecture as the underlying transport mechanism for the DAFS protocol enables the potential of Fibre Channel by bypassing the overhead associated with traditional operating system functions and promoting efficient transfer of data over a shared network protocol. Network Appliance's initiative in employing DAFS technology as an open file-transfer protocol assures users a low-latency, zero-copy, high-performance network computing environment.''
Fujitsu
``Fujitsu believes that DAFS is important for our business as well as for the industry, because it provides highly scalable data-center solutions by enabling servers to share consolidated data and it will also leverage emerging new server architectures such as InfiniBand,'' said Mitsuru Sanagi, general manager, Strategic Planning Division, Computer Systems Group, Fujitsu Limited.
Gadzoox Networks
``With SAN's continued growth in the mainstream enterprise market, Gadzoox sees security and data-sharing as key pieces,'' said Wayne Rickard, chief technology officer of Gadzoox Networks, a leading supplier of Fibre Channel switches, routers, management products and hubs. ``Until now, low-overhead file access has been a missing piece of the puzzle. Gadzoox is pleased to be one of the inaugural members of the DAFS initiative.''
Giganet
``We are pleased to be working with Network Appliance and other members of the collaborative to deliver our VI capabilities to the NAS market,'' said Gareth Taube, vice president of marketing of Giganet. ``VI provides very high performance, with greatly reduced system overhead and low latency, which are critical advantages to support today's Internet environments.''
HighGround
``HighGround is 101% behind supporting and participating in the development of industry standards that promote a more efficient and productive environment for end-users,'' said Joel Reich, vice president of marketing, HighGround Systems, Inc. ``HighGround expects that the amount of mission-critical data will accelerate dramatically, that storage network management software will be ever more crucial to managing these valuable corporate information assets, and that companies will only benefit from the adherence to standards in this area.''
Intel Corporation
``As the lead developer of the VI architecture, Intel looks forward to the incorporation of VI technology into a new, highly advanced file system like DAFS,'' said Lauri Minas, director of server initiative marketing at Intel. ``Intel's experience in building the world's most powerful parallel supercomputer makes us intimately aware of the big challenges the industry faces in building robust, Internet-scale file-sharing solutions. DAFS promises to be a key element of those solutions.''
Landmark Graphics Corporation
``As the leading supplier of software and systems for oil and gas exploration and production, Landmark Graphics continuously strives to deliver the highest possible performance on some of the most I/O intensive problems found in any discipline,'' said Bill Curtis, director, computer science, Landmark Graphics Corporation. ``Increasing the throughput between large-scale storage systems and networks of heterogeneous computational nodes will dramatically improve the performance of high-end visualization and processing applications, particularly for parallel clusters. Through participation in DAFS, Landmark plans to accelerate the development and deployment of these advanced data-to-memory techniques.''
Oracle Corporation
``As the leading supplier of network-attached database solutions, Oracle will continue to drive data management and storage technologies to improve the customer experience,'' said Dave Dargo, vice president, enterprise platforms division, Oracle Corporation. ``In today's Internet economy, efficient management of data is the key ingredient behind a successful business. For this reason, DAFS is a compelling collaborative initiative that aims to provide specific protocols that will enhance ebusiness applications as they relate to data management and storage.''
QLogic Corporation
``QLogic is enthusiastic about Network Appliance's DAFS announcement, as this sets the stage for the commercialization of VI-initially on Fibre Channel, with future deployment on InfiniBand,'' stated Frank Berry, vice president of product marketing for QLogic's computer systems group. ``As the leading provider of Fibre Channel NICs for storage applications, QLogic is excited about this opportunity to extend our SCSI and IP protocol based products into the VI space.''
Quantum|ATL
``Quantum|ATL welcomes DAFS as a new remote file system protocol that further enhances the advantages of network-attached storage,'' said Gene Nagle, product line manager at ATL. ``By taking advantage of DAFS, ATL will be able to provide customers with intelligent secondary storage systems that are tightly coupled into clusters of specialized storage and computing devices using our network-attached Open Storage Networking technology.''
Red Hat
``As the demands for more scalable and robust Web infrastructures increase, customers need ways to deploy advanced storage networks more efficiently,'' said Paul McNamara, vice president of business development at Red Hat, Inc. ``Red Hat believes that DAFS can provide our customers with a key component of a high-performance, low-latency storage network.''
Seagate
``As the world's leading storage device provider, Seagate enthusiastically supports the DAFS initiative,'' said Dave Aune, Seagate vice president of research and development, Internet storage solutions. ``The world today is running at Internet speed, and that means an exploding demand for better ways to store, access, and manage information. A protocol like DAFS that abstracts the storage from the application environment will make it easier for users to manage and grow their storage resources. Seagate is committed to making storage more usable, more manageable, and more adaptable to address the information explosion. We believe DAFS can become an important part of these activities.''
Spectra Logic
``Network Appliance is further broadening the market for its filer products through support of DAFS. Spectra Logic is pleased to expand its existing strategic relationship with NetApp through participation in this effort, and intends to support DAFS in its current and future high-performance automated tape libraries and NAS product suite. We see a significant role in DAFS associated with data protection, backup, archival and HSM-the markets in which Spectra Logic presently participates. We are especially excited about the ability of DAFS to provide all of the advantages of file-oriented data access and management methodologies coupled with the efficiency heretofore only associated with block mode access. Our business is growing with ISPs, data base vendors, and SSPs and this will be welcomed by our customers who need to dramatically scale the data they store and who are also extremely dependent on high availability to their data,'' said Nathan Thompson, CEO of Spectra Logic.
StorageNetworks
``StorageNetworks sees DAFS as a means to provide the performance and scalability advantages of SAN with the data-management advantages of NAS,'' said Bruce Gordon, vice president of marketing for StorageNetworks, Inc., a Waltham, MA-based storage services provider (SSP).
Troika Networks
``DAFS exemplifies the flexibility of using Virtual Interface (VI) to bring the highest levels of performance, reliability, and manageability to dynamic businesses,'' said Bill Terrell, chief technology officer and founder of Troika Networks. ``A Fibre Channel application infrastructure enabled by Troika Networks is a great fit for companies seeking to rapidly reduce their operating costs while bringing secure, innovative solutions to their customers.''
VA Linux Systems
``Improving data access is critical to expanding the Internet infrastructure,'' said Brian Biles, vice president of marketing for VA Linux Systems. ``VA Linux is excited to work with the DAFS Collaborative to enable open source solutions using the new protocol.''
Vixel Corporation
``At Vixel, we are committed to working collaboratively with industry leaders such as Network Appliance to drive open standards for storage networks,'' said Brian Reed, senior business development manager for Vixel Corporation. ``A heterogeneous open file system such as DAFS, which permits access to storage from any server, is good for Internet-based applications and for the end-user community we all collectively serve.''
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Contact:
Network Appliance, Inc.
Eric Brown, 408/822-3463
ebrown@netapp.com
Jaime Jinks, 408/822-3761
jjinks@netapp.com
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