Patent ID: 7953917

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: an expander to be attached as an intervening device between a communications protocol controller and another attached device, the expander being to misrepresent itself, during an identification process with the another attached device, as being an end device instead of being an edge expander device such that the expander appears to the another attached device to be the end device even though the expander actually is not the end device, the identification process being during a first mode of operation of the expander, the expander also being capable of operating in a second mode of operation that is different from the first mode of operation, the expander being to identify itself and to operate as the edge expander device in the second mode of operation, the expander having fanout ports, the fanout ports being assigned the same SAS port-layer address in the second mode of operation, the same SAS port-layer address to be used to identify the expander when the expander is in the second mode of operation, each fanout port having a phy identifier when the expander is in the second mode of operation that is unique within the expander, each of the fanout ports being assigned a respective unique SAS port-layer address during the first mode of operation, the expander being configured to operate in the first mode during a power-up configuration process by a processor executing boot code from memory, the memory being located on a host bus adapter that also includes the expander and the controller, the processor also being to execute a host operating system.