Abstract: A storage appliance includes: control circuitry; a plurality of storage communication ports; and switch circuitry configured to forward packets compliant with a storage protocol to identified ones of the plurality of storage communication ports. In an aspect, a memory supports a forwarding table or tables. The apparatus can implement storage appliance operations by division of the storage appliance operations into (i) data movement operations performed by the switch circuitry instead of the general processor circuitry and (ii) general computation operations performed by the switch circuitry instead of the general processor circuitry.