1. An intelligent storage controller comprising: at least one non-volatile physical storage device under the control of the intelligent storage controller; an operating system; logic to provide storage management for the at least one non-volatile physical storage device; a communications connection operable to receive commands from an external device; embedded data transformation software to perform one or more data transformation operations on data residing on the at least one non-volatile physical storage device; software installable as a service on the intelligent storage controller to: listen on the communications connection for commands from an external device specifying data transformations to be performed; pass the commands to the data transformation software; and send result codes returned from execution of the commands back to the external device.