Over time, various interconnects and protocols have been developed to address the various interconnectivity issues associated with computing. Several examples of interconnectivity include server-based clustering, storage networks, intranet networks, and many others.
Today, it is common for a single installation to have a plurality of interconnects for these various interconnectivity solutions. For example, FIG. 1 shows a typical environment where a plurality of servers 10a, 10b, 10c are connected to each other via high speed Ethernet, such as through a switch 20. This switch 20 allows the various servers to exchange data with each other. This switch 20 may also connect to a second switch or gateway 30, which provides a second interface, such as FibreChannel to the storage devices 40a, 40b. 
In another embodiment, such as that shown in FIG. 2, a cluster switch 50 is used to connect a plurality of servers, such as mail server 60a, application server 60b and data base server 60c together.
FIG. 3 shows a typical computer architecture, showing the interconnect between two servers, such as servers 10a, 10b of FIG. 1. In this embodiment, there is an Ethernet controller 70a, 70b, in each server 10a, 10b, These controllers 70a, 70b each communicate with the switch 20. In many instances, the Ethernet controllers use a PCI, or PCI EXPRESS interface to connect to the motherboard 80a, 80b of the respective server 10a, 10b. 
Therefore, in operation, the CPU on the server 10a generates a message that it wishes to send to another node, such as server 10b. It creates the data payload, or application layer payload. In many embodiments, TCP/IP is used as the transport protocol. Therefore, the message body is encapsulated with TCP overhead and IP overhead. If the Ethernet controller 70a utilizes PCI EXPRESS interface, a PCI EXPRESS link packet of the datalink layer will be appended at the physical layer prior to its transmission to Ethernet controller 70a. FIG. 4 shows a typical PCI EXPRESS path carrying TCP/IP packets, with each of these components.
Once the Ethernet controller 70a receives the packet from the server 10a, it must strip off the PCI EXPRESS overhead information. The Ethernet controller driver parses the data stream to retrieve the destination IP address. It then associates an Ethernet ID of the destination IP address and appends that to the Ethernet frame. It then appends traditional Ethernet overhead. FIG. 5 shows the format of a typical Ethernet format packet. The controller 70a then transmits the packet to switch 20.
At the switch 20, the Ethernet overhead is stripped off, and the switch 20 determines through which port the packet should be transmitted, based on the destination address. The switch then creates a new Ethernet overhead that is appended to the packet, and it is transmitted to server 10b. 
Server 10b receives the packet, strips off the Ethernet overhead. It then embeds the data payload in PCI Express datalink and via PCI EXPRESS physical layer, prepares to send the data to the CPU on server 10b. Once the data reaches the motherboard 80b, the data payload is extracted from the PCI EXPRESS datalink from the physical layers and the packet is stored in memory as a TCP/IP packet, where the CPU can parse it and act upon it.
Looking at FIG. 3, it can be seen that, in theory, there is a virtual connection between the PCI EXPRESS physical layers of the two servers 10a, 10b. In other words, all of the other components are simply necessary to add and remove overhead information to allow the packet to move from the PCI EXPRESS port on the motherboard of server 10a to the PCI EXPRESS port on the motherboard of server 10b. 
Similar architectures exist for other interconnect strategies, where the packet is translated from PCI EXPRESS to another protocol to allow transmission from the network adapter to another device. The second device then removes the overhead associated with the other protocol and generates a PCI EXPRESS format message for transfer to the CPU of the device.
Therefore, it would be beneficial if there were a method and system that could transmit information between multiple devices without the need to utilize multiple formats and interconnects for these transmissions.