Patent ID: 8230145

Claim:
A memory expansion blade for a multi-protocol architecture, comprising: a blade fabric connection to connect said memory expansion blade to a plurality of server blades; a plurality of dual inline memory modules (DIMMs) that are industry standard DIMMs; a multi-protocol memory controller coupled to the DIMMs and operable to control operations of the DIMMs and configured to provide said plurality of server blades with expansion memory, the controller, comprising: two or more memory channel controllers, each of the memory channel controllers coupled to a single channel of DIMM, wherein the DIMM in each single channel operate according to a specific protocol, and wherein each of the memory channel controllers performs address decoding, read/write operations, memory refreshing, and error correction, a protocol engine coupled to the memory channel controllers, wherein the protocol engine is configurable to accommodate one or more of the specific protocols, wherein the specific protocol is selected from a list consisting of fully buffered DIMM protocol, Infiniband, PCI-E protocol, Ethernet with iWARP/RDMA protocol, cHT protocol, and CSI cache coherency protocol, and a system interface coupled to the protocol engine and configurable to provide electrical power and common low voltage differential signaling appropriate for the one or more of the specific protocols; and a disk drive capable of receiving at least a portion of memory resident on the memory expansion blade.