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Technology Stocks : Network Appliance -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (3603)	7/11/2000 6:07:37 PM
From: DownSouth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10934

As background material, see NetApp's press release of 6/13 announcing purchase of OCRA, holder of Virtual Interface (VI) IPR and expertise: netapp.com Then, have a look at their release one week later, announcing an alliance with INTC and SGT in collaborating to establish a standard for Direct Access File File System (DAFS) protocol using VI. 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. Generally viewed as most applicable for clustering, the Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture defines an open industry specification for an interface that provides low-latency and high-bandwidth communication between servers and storage devices. NetApp will be taking VI technology from Orca and using it to develop future NAS products in which communication between memory and other devices bypass the operating system, resulting in much higher performance. (I am paraphrasing from an analyst's report in the paragraph above.) If NTAP/INTC/SGT are successful in pushing the VI standard, then customers will be able to run VI "agents" on their host computers (NT, SUNW, H-P...) so that file operations are happening directly between the VI agent on the host and the VI agent on the NTAP filer. File operations would occur at the network level between network controllers, bypassing the operating systems of all involved and sending data in a very efficient manner over the network. This is another step in the disintegration of computers. The I/O system becomes (almost) separate from the OS and CPU. Hope this helps. Let me know.