Patent ID: 7636804

Claim:
A storage sub-system for storing data emulating a storage tape device, comprising: a controller having a main memory, wherein the controller is coupled to a plurality of disk drives and configured to emulate a storage tape device, and a PCI (peripheral component interconnect) expansion card which connects between the controller and a host, wherein the PCI expansion card comprising: a data interface to receive a sequence of data from the host; a local memory buffer; an FPGA having a PCI interface, wherein the FPGA is coupled to the data interface, the local memory buffer, and two or more compression devices, wherein the sequence of data is transferred from the data interface to the local memory buffer through the FPGA, from the local memory buffer to the compression device, from the compression device to the main memory via the PCI interface of the FPGA, and from the main memory to the plurality of disk drives, wherein, the sequence of data received from the local memory buffer is divided into two or more blocks, wherein said two or more blocks are indexed using a scatter/gather list, compressed in parallel by said two or more compression devices, applied data protection functions including Cyclic Redundancy Checks in each block, and wherein said two or more block from the compression device are stored in the plurality of disk drives and the controller is configured to retrieve said two or more blocks from plurality of disk drives according to said scatter/gather list.