Patent ID: 8743872

Claim:
A system comprising: a switch fabric backplane having a plurality of physical ports; and a plurality of pluggable modules coupled with the switch fabric backplane via the physical ports, the pluggable modules comprising: a plurality of Symmetric MultiProcessor (SMP) modules, at least one Input/Output Processor (IOP) module, a plurality of Input/Output (I/O) controller modules, wherein each of the I/O controller modules is coupled to a respective one of the SMP modules and the at least one IOP module and a respective one of the physical ports of the switch fabric backplane, and is configurable to enable the respective SMP module or IOP module to communicate at least storage traffic at least in part via the switch fabric by addressing cells to physical port addresses corresponding to the physical ports of the switch fabric backplane, wherein at least a first one of the SMP modules is enabled to execute initiator software to partially manage the storage traffic and provide software-process-visible state via one or more dedicated hardware registers, and wherein the at least one IOP module is enabled to execute target software to partially manage the storage traffic, and one or more storage controller modules, wherein the storage controller modules are coupled to the at least one IOP module to enable communication of at least some information of the storage traffic with one or more storage devices, and wherein the I/O controller module coupled to the first SMP module and the I/O controller module coupled to the IOP module each include a respective network identification register, and writing both the respective network identification registers with a particular value enables transport of the storage traffic in accordance with a particular Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) identified by the particular value.