Now that DFS is available on multiple platforms, we are seeing steadily growing interest in the product. And with the large number of Unix servers already available, that gives DFS significant platform coverage. For example, IBM has some numbers where DFS outperforms NFS, despite the added benefits DFS provides. Finally, we are seeing DFS succeed at a number of our large customer sites in a variety of markets, including defense, manufacturing, banking and insurance. A One of the things we recognized for a long time is the need to add transactional capabilities.
Many enterprise applications require integrity.
They require integrity when a client starts a unit of work and that work must complete successfully on all the servers and databases that it accesses. The Encina family of products, which we have been developing since 1989, augment DCE standard services with transactional integrity, distributed administration and load balancing across multiple servers. Encina provides interoperability with other non-DCE environments that perform transaction processing, particularly mainframes. Encina provides important connectivity to relational databases, which play an important role in these environments. All this while maintaining the benefits of DCE security and naming.