Patent ID: 8667110

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a backplane including a plurality of slots; replaceable stateless storage cartridges; and at least two replaceable stateless compute cartridges, each compute cartridge comprising: an interface to a communications network, the compute cartridge remotely managed via the communications network; and memory to store a distributed manager, the distributed manager to dynamically maximize compute resource utilization over the plurality of compute cartridges; wherein the backplane includes a network switch and a serial storage protocol expander, the network switch to be used to provide secure and dedicated management communication between all of the compute cartridges, the serial storage protocol expander to allow any-to-any mapping of the compute cartridges to the storage cartridges; also wherein the plurality of slots includes at least two slots, each of the at least two slots including at least one respective system bus interface, serial storage protocol bus interface, control bus interface, and network interface.