Patent ID: 7733874

Claim:
An article of manufacture including code for processing communications among a storage drive, an Input/Output (I/O) device, and a host and for causing operations to be performed, the operations, comprising: receiving an initial request from the storage drive to the I/O device; receiving a response to the initial request from the I/O device to the storage drive; processing each response and request received from the storage drive to the I/O device by performing: accessing the response or request from a packet encoded using a first communication protocol comprising a host driven command response protocol; generating a packet including the accessed response or request into a packet encoded using a second communication protocol comprising a network protocol; determining whether the host is used to communicate the packet from the storage drive to the I/O device; and transmitting the generated packet to the I/O device in response to determining that the host is not used to communicate the packet from the storage drive to the I/O device; and processing each response and request received from the I/O device to the storage drive by performing: accessing the response or request from a packet encoded using the second communication protocol; generating a packet including the accessed response or request into a packet encoded using the first communication protocol; determining whether the host is used to communicate the packet from the I/O device to the storage drive; and transmitting the generated packet to the storage drive in response to determining that the host is not used to communicate the packet from the I/O device to the storage drive, wherein the host is used to communicate the packet as part of in-band communication and the host is not used to communicate the packet for out-of-band communication.