System, apparatus and method for controlling the movement of data in a data processing system. The apparatus receives commands from at least one protocol engine and generates contexts representing the commands. The contexts are a data structure representing information for programming data transfers pursuant to the commands. Instruction requests based on the contexts are issued to the at least one protocol engine and to at least one DMA to efficiently control the movement of data to/from the at least one protocol engine from/to a local memory. The functions within the system are partitioned in a way that allows functions to be scaled for better performance and/or to support different protocols.