Another approach to hardware support for database management was ICL's CAFS accelerator, <answer>a hardware disk controller with programmable search capabilities</answer>. In the long term, these efforts were generally unsuccessful because specialized database machines could not keep pace with the rapid development and progress of general-purpose computers. Thus most database systems nowadays are software systems running on general-purpose hardware, using general-purpose computer data storage. However this idea is still pursued for certain applications by some companies like Netezza and Oracle (Exadata).
What is a CAFS accelerator?
a hardware disk controller with programmable search capabilities