Patent ID: 7620981

Claim:
A method comprising: associating, with a packet processor, a first virtual device with a first physical device element, which is a disk drive, and a second virtual device with a second physical device element; assigning, by the packet processor, the first virtual device a first host address and the second virtual device a second host address, wherein the first and second host addresses are different network routable addresses that are both associated with a common frame address that corresponds to a network interface that communicatively couples the packet processor to a network; receiving, by the packet processor, an information packet from the network interface, the information packet having a control portion including the first host address; routing, by the packet processor, the information packet to the first virtual device; and associating, by the packet processor, the first virtual device with a plurality of disk drives, wherein the first virtual device is a multicast group of logical partitions distributed over the plurality of disk drives.