At the tail end of the Internet boom, I was working for a fly-by-night, storage-focused telecom company when I first heard about iSCSI. Given the growth of the Internet, a storage technology based on IP seemed a safe bet. Ethernet was becoming the global transport du jour, so iSCSI appeared to be a sure winner--networking leader Cisco Systems had gobbled up early iSCSI pioneer NuSpeed Internet Systems for $450 million in 2000.

But like many technologies from that era, iSCSI didn't live up to its early promise. Back in 2000, the protocol was fairly new and marginally stable products were extremely basic. I remember seeing a NuSpeed/Cisco box at Interop. It had one port for connecting to a server and another for connecting to a storage system. In other words, it was a basic protocol converter and little else. At the time, vendors of 16-port Fibre Channel (FC) switches probably laughed off these devices.