The Essentials Of Computer Organization And Architecture 4th Edition by Linda Null,Julia Lobur

Exercise 9

One of the engineers who works for you is proposing changes to the bus architecture of the systems that your company manufactures. She claims that if the bus is modified to support network protocols directly, the systems will have no need for network cards. She claims that you could also eliminate your SAN and connect the client computers directly to the disk array. Would you object to this approach? Explain. Hint: Think of other uses for the main bus besides carrying bytes to and from storage devices.