Activities
IBM Haifa Research Lab (HRL) has been at the forefront of iSCSI since its inception. In a sense, iSCSI was born in HRL. In cooperation with the IBM Almaden Research Center (ARC), HRL personnel built a prototype of an Ethernet accessed SCSI device. Interest was raised among various vendors, and in March 2000 the first SCSI over TCP (iSCSI) specification was proposed to the IETF. The authors of the original Internet draft were from IBM and Cisco. As the specification was revised and refined, contributions came from many different people working for a spectrum of companies in the storage and networking arenas. The main author throughout the evolution of the specification was Julian Satran, one of HRL's Distinguished Engineers. In September 2000, IBM demonstrated the implementation of the iSCSI protocol at a number of public forums. HRL implemented the initiators, while ARC implemented the target for IBM's TotalStorage 200i iSCSI appliance. The TotalStorage 200i was the first iSCSI appliance in the market, and was developed and brought to market in a record 9 months time. HRL's iSCSI initiators and ARC's iSCSI target have regularly appeared at the iSCSI Interoperability Plugfests at the University of New Hampshire, and they have been a benchmark against which other implementations are measured. HRL continues to be involved in iSCSI research and development activities, such as the recently-publicized Boot over iSCSI (iBoot) capability of a diskless workstation.