PCI Express is quickly being adopted as the I/O interconnect of choice in today's single host computing platforms. Host-to-host cluster communication, however, has been regarded as beyond the scope of PCI Express. The model in today's cluster platforms has been to utilize PCI Express for I/O subsystem communication and a separate dedicated clustering interconnect for host-to-host communication. With these new Dolphin Express products customers can standardize on PCI Express for both interconnects using common components.

Dolphin Express is delivering economic benefit to its customers in the telecommunication, financial, and web 2.0 infrastructure markets by delivering the highest application performance at the best cost. Real world application performance benchmarks show the value of the Dolphin Express's super low latency technology. With less than 2 microsecond latency Dolphin Express provides significantly better response time and throughput in database clusters than Gigabit Ethernet. During the past months, customers like Cloudmark in the US and Sweden-based Teligent AB, have conducted independent benchmarks verifying significant improvements over Ethernet for MySQL cluster and MySQL replication. Recent benchmarks performed jointly by MySQL, Intel and Dolphin demonstrated response time and throughput improvements of up to 4 times that of Ethernet.

The PCI Express cluster products consist of the DXH510 PCI Express Host Adapter and the DXS410 Cluster Switch. The DXH510 is a standard low profile x8 PCI Express card supporting either copper or fiber optic cabling with capability of transfer rates up to 20Gbps. The DXS410 is a 1RU rack mountable 10 port PCI Express cluster switch.

The products will ship with the transparent Dolphin Express SuperSockets software libraries. The solution provides a fast and resilient communication channel for all applications using Berkeley sockets - TCP/UDP/IP/RDS on Linux. Dolphin Express software enhancements will provide support for integrated multi-compute I/O and cluster configurations. Dolphin is also working on supporting 5Gbps PCI Express signaling and shared I/O capability for future release.

The products will sample to customers in Q4.