Intelligent Peripheral Interface

Intelligent Peripheral Interface (IPI) was a server-centric storage interface used in the 1980s and early 1990s with an ISO-9318 standard.

The idea behind IPI is that the disk drives themselves are as simple as possible, containing only the lowest level control circuitry, while the IPI interface card encapsulates most of the disk control complexity. The IPI interface card, as a central point of control, is thus theoretically able to best coordinate accesses to the connected disks, as it "knows" more about the states of the connected disks than would, say, a SCSI interface.