DAFS is designed to improve the efficiency and resiliency of shared file access in a clustered, System Area Network environment. Separating computing resources from storage resources allows each to be scaled and managed independently. Computing resources can be scaled by adding diskless commodity servers. Storage can be scaled either by adding more storage to existing file servers or by adding more file servers. Application servers see a common shared pool of storage.
Availability improves because the architecture supports simple application server failover.
File servers can be set up to failover also. A reference implementation of DAFS should be available in late 2000.