In a preferred embodiment, the interface controllers 218 are PCI-to-SCSI controllers each of which can include one or more SCSI channels 224A-224N. Each SCSI channel 224 contains one or more peripheral devices 222A-222N such as but not limited to disk drives, tape drives, various types of optical disk drives, printers, scanners, processors, communication devices, medium changers, and the like.