A backup appliance that can be disposed on a computer adapter card mid-plane internal to a data storage system. The appliance includes logic on the computer adapter card. The logic is configured for selectively allowing either directly controlling the robot picker through the fiber channel connection or indirectly controlling the robot picker by communicating with the backup server. The logic is also configured for controlling buffering of data stored in the data storage system and communicating directly with media backup drives for writing the data from buffers in the data storage system onto the backup media drives.