This paper addresses a key issue that arises when attaching storage devices directly to IP networks: the perceived need for hardware acceleration of the TCP/IP networking stack. While many implicitly assume that acceleration is required, the evidence shows that this conclusion is not well founded. In the past, network accelerators have had mixed success, and the current economic justification for hardware acceleration is poor given the low cost of host CPU cycles. The I/O load for many applications is dominated by disk latency, not transfer rate, and hardware protocol accelerators have little effect on the I/O performance in these environments. Application benchmarks were run on an IP storage subsystem to measure performance and CPU utilization on Email, database, file serving, and backup applications. The results show that good performance can be obtained without protocol acceleration.