Abstract: An anti-virus blade provides anti-virus services to a storage system and eliminates the need to develop an interface to initiate a scan operation at the blade. An anti-virus engine executed at the blade receives a request to scan data maintained by the storage system. The anti-virus engine creates a stub file (e.g., a file that has the same name as the Currently Amended file indicated in the request, but does not contain data) and issues an I/O command to the file. A file framework module executed at the blade intercepts the I/O to the dummy file and passes the I/O to an anti-virus application, which is registered with the file framework to receive I/Os from the anti-virus engine. The anti-virus application, in turn, initiates a scan operation by issuing a read request to the stub file, without receiving the request for scanning directly from the storage system.