Patent ID: 7155546

Claim:
A storage enclosure for interfacing with storage units and an external device, comprising: a backplane; at least one slot in the storage enclosure for receiving one storage unit; two physical interfaces on the backplane for at least one slot, wherein one storage unit is capable of being positioned in the slot to mate with one of the two physical interfaces for the slot, wherein each physical interface supports different storage interconnect architecture; and an expander on the backplane coupled to a plurality of the slots and the external device, wherein the expander includes circuitry to perform: receiving a transmission from one storage unit in one slot coupled to the expander; maintaining information on storage interconnect architectures and transmission characteristics used for the storage interconnect architectures, wherein the storage interconnect architectures have transmission characteristics; determining the transmission characteristics of the received transmission; determining from the information the storage interconnect architecture associated with the determined transmission characteristics; using the information on the determined storage interconnect architecture to process the transmission and determine a transport layer for the received transmission, wherein there is one transport layer for each supported transport protocol; and forwarding the transmission to the determined transport layer.