A network storage appliance includes a chassis, enclosing a storage controller and first and second servers. The storage controller has first and second I/O ports for coupling to first and second I/O links. The storage controller controls a plurality of physical disk drives and presents the plurality of physical disk drives as one or more logical disk drives on the first and second I/O links. The servers each have an I/O port for coupling to a respective one of the first and second I/O links. Each of the servers transmits packets to the storage controller over the respective I/O link. The packets include block-level protocol disk commands each identifying one of the logical disk drives, such as SCSI block level protocol commands each identifying one of said logical disk drives as a SCSI logical unit. The I/O links may be FibreChannel, Ethernet, or Infiniband links, for example.