Patent ID: 8677068

Claim:
A system comprising: a storage subsystem having physical components comprising a plurality of physical storage devices and a physical switch-portion having a plurality of ports; a host coupled via a dedicated point-to-point link to a dedicated port of the plurality of ports; wherein each physical storage device comprises: at least one range of storage, at least one port enabled to be coupled via a respective point-to-point link to a respective port of the plurality of ports, and agent logic enabling the physical storage device to operate as at least one agent of one or more primary agents and one or more secondary agents of the storage subsystem, each primary agent enabled to accept host-initiated storage access requests, to generate sub-requests, and to accumulate sub-statuses, each secondary agent enabled to accept at least one of the sub-requests and to generate at least one of the sub-statuses; and wherein the storage subsystem is enabled to operate one or more logical storage devices, each logical storage device enabling the host to access via a single logical interface an aggregation of the storage ranges distributed over the storage devices corresponding to one primary agent of the primary agents and at least one secondary agent of the secondary agents.