Patent ID: 7668925

Claim:
A method of handling connection requests in a serially attached SCSI (SAS) expander comprising: receiving a connection request from a source node connected to the expander, the request addressed to a destination node, the source and destination nodes being nodes in a SAS topology logically divided into a plurality of virtual domains, each node in the SAS topology being associated with at least one of the plurality of virtual domains, and nodes associated with one of the plurality of virtual domains being inaccessible to nodes solely associated with others of the plurality of virtual domains; determining a virtual domain associated with the source node; determining that the destination node is associated only to virtual domains other than the virtual domain associated with the source node and is inaccessible; and transmitting a connection rejection to the source node, wherein the step of determining a virtual domain associated with the source node includes assigning a zone identifier to the connection request when the zone identifier is not present in the connection request, and wherein the step of assigning a zone identifier includes selecting a zone identifier in accordance with a SAS phy over which the connection request is received.