John Matze

ohn Matze, one of the pioneers of the iSCSI protocol, decided to start his own company while watching an okapi, a half-horse, half-zebra, at the San Diego Animal Park in 2002. Today, he is helping Overland Storage, which bought his brainchild,Okapi,last June, move from tape automation to focus on IP-based SANs.

Matze began looking for new ways to run SCSI over TCP while programming director at Veritas Software in 2000. At the time, the focus for networking storage was on Fibre Channel, but Matze says he recognized the potential of Gigabit Ethernet. "I looked at history and saw that any protocol that went against TCP would lose," he recalls. His boss told him to check out a forum developing a new protocol called iSCSI. Matze joined the organization, where he says his main contribution was to eliminate potential delays by moving to prevent new technologies such as RDMA from entering the debate.

Greg Lally, president of Synegi, an Irvine, Calif., solution provider, says Matze understands what iSCSI means to the market. "Customers bring in [high-priced] EMC, Hitachi, whatever, and pretty soon they're over budget. Then they bring in iSCSI, and it's completely different," Lally says.