1. A switching system having a plurality of line cards, each said line card having identification information based therein and comprising a hardware processor providing remote direct memory access capability for enabling data transfer using TCP over IP networks, said processor being programmable and sending and receiving data packets' also having identification information based therein, said packets transmitted, encapsulated or encoded using a iSCSI, iFCP, infiniband, SATA, SAS, IP, ICMP, IPSEC, DES, 3DES, AES, FC, SCSI, FCIP, NFS, CIFS, DAFS, HTTP, XML, XML derivative, SGML, or HTML format, or a combination of any of the foregoing.