PCI Express [3][7], as the successor to PCI, has moved to the forefront as the predominant local host bus for
computer system motherboard architectures. A cabled version of PCI Express [10] allows for high performance
directly attached bus expansion via docks or expansion chassis. These docks and expansion chassis may be
populated with any of the myriad of widely available PCI Express or PCI/PCI-X [1][8][11] bus adapter cards. The
adapter cards may be storage oriented (i.e. Fibre Channel [15], SCSI [4] ), video processing, audio processing, or any
number of application specific I/O functions. A problem with certain blade architectures [16] is PCI Express is not
easily accessible, thus expansion is awkward, difficult, or costly.