There are ways to squeeze more performance out of iSCSI. Intelenet's Stein, for example, plugs iSCSI HBAs from QLogic into his servers. This is one of the technologies that got "flatter," in his opinion, making iSCSI both fast and cheap enough to move his datacenter from DAS to SAN.

"You can enhance iSCSI with HBAs," Reeves says. "You can also add, on the target side, TOE (TCP offload engine) cards or DMA (direct memory access) cards. On the initiator side, you can get NICs with iSCSI initiators built in."

Anderson of Emergent Networks chose to use QLogic iSCSI HBAs for the engagement with Chief Manufacturing. "We could have stuck with the Ethernet ports, and Microsoft's iSCSI Initiator [the QLogic HBAs come with a separate iSCSI Initiator]," he says, "but we went this route in order to offload the TCP/IP from the processor onto the iSCSI cards."

Now, Anderson is not sure the performance boost from that is worth the extra expense and hassle. "Some of the Ethernet cards from Intel and Broadcom now come with TCP/IP offload cards, so, in my opinion, the lines between iSCSI HBAs and standard Ethernet interfaces are blurring."

Meanwhile there is no doubt that cheaper 10GbE (10 Gigabit Ethernet) is on the way, and iSCSI is one of the drivers. In January, Bell Micro, a distributor of storage and computing technologies, signed a distribution agreement with Chelsio, a provider of 10GbE Ethernet adapters and ASIC solutions. Also in January, Brocade Communications bought Silverback Systems, a company that makes network processors to help to accelerate the speed and performance of storage traffic in networked storage environments. Brocade cited Silverback's technology and expertise in iSCSI as a main reason for the acquisition.