Patent ID: 7934040

Claim:
A storage router connected to storage remote from hosts to provide virtual local storage to the hosts: a first controller operable to communicate over a first transport medium; a second controller operable to communicate over a second transport medium, wherein at least one of the first or the second transport medium is a serial transport medium; a supervisor unit coupled to the first controller and the second controller, the supervisor unit operable to: maintain a map that maps hosts connected to the first transport medium to subsets of storage space on the remote storage connected to the second transport medium in order to implement centralized access controls to the subsets of remote storage; process a command received from a host, wherein the command includes a request for access to a subset of storage; determine if the host is allowed access to the requested subset of storage in accordance with the map; and allow the requesting host to access the requested subset of storage using native low level block protocol if the requesting host is allowed access to the requested subset of storage.