1. A system for accelerating transmission control protocol (TCP) network traffic processing, the system comprising: a network traffic reception module configured to receive TCP network traffic; a hardware-based acceleration module configured to accelerate TCP network traffic processing in a steady state network connection, the acceleration module further configured with windowing functionality for performing flow control and congestion avoidance during TCP network traffic processing, and retransmission functionality for retransmitting packets in response to timeouts and errors as defined by a TCP network protocol; and a software-based processing module configured to process TCP connection sequences, termination sequences, and non-steady state TCP network traffic; wherein the system is adapted to be an iSCSI storage target.