What is the purpose of the BlueStor PCIe Extender?
A PCIe extender permits a user to extend the PCIe bus in his host computer, adding more PCIe slots externally. The BlueStor™ PCIe Extender is a standard 3U rackmount storage system (16 x 3.5″ disk drives) providing redundant power and cooling like other BlueStor™ products, but instead of containing a mother board to create a server, it contains a 5-slot PCI Express backplane featuring one x8 PCIe slot and four x4 PCIe slots which may be populated by any PCIe compliant devices from RAID controllers to NICs. The host connection is a x8 PCIe cable to an adapter card we provide with this unit. The adapter card plugs into a PCIe slot in the host computer and provides one “external” x8 PCIe port for the cable connection to the Extender. (Note: The adapter card is not a bridge or bus converter; it only creates an “external” connector for the internal PCIe slot. It has no impact on the bus or performance.) The Extender may be concatenated to another Extender to create even more external PCIe s
