An upper level protocol processing mechanism is employed with high performance offload processors to increase system performance while amortizing the cost of employing such processors. Such an upper level protocol processing mechanism can be employed to offload, for example, storage access protocols. An example system might have one or more clients and one or more servers each coupled to its respective storage. One or more front end processors is coupled between the clients and the servers. The clients access the storage coupled to the servers via a storage access protocol. In accordance with the invention, the storage access protocol is divided into a front end protocol portion and a back end protocol portion. The front end protocol portion is executed on the front end processors, while the back end protocol portion is executed on the servers. The back end protocol portion is transparent to the clients.