Breaking the 7-slot ceiling for cPCI backplanes for applications where additional expansion slots are required such as industrial control, military, medical or transportation systems, the 6U CompactPCI 16-slot backplane increases the number of available expansion slots to 14, doubling the capacity for I/O boards in a system. The backplane is compatible with Teknor's Pentium- and Pentium II-based CPU boards and supports a transition module for rear I/O. It can also be used with other CPU boards that share the same pinout as the Teknor boards. The backplane supports up to two modular power supplies and a storage module. The storage module can contain a hard drive and floppy or CD-ROM.