Dolphin Announces New Switch for Composable Architectures

Dolphin Interconnect Solutions has announced a new 24-port switch for I/O expansion and PCIe fabric. The MXS824 offers an innovative approach to composable architecture, a recent trend that combines the benefits of software-defined infrastructure with hardware-based device sharing and provisioning.

According to the announcement, “Dolphin’s unique approach to building composable architectures is called device lending. Device lending allows access to devices installed in servers as well as in expansion boxes or JBoFs. This creates a pool of transparent I/O resources that can then be shared among computers without any application-specific distribution mechanisms or requiring any modifications to drivers. Just as importantly, the resources can easily be reallocated whenever required, allowing for extremely flexible and ever-changing distributions of resources.”

The MXS824 is designed to work with Dolphin’s PCIe fabric to connect multiple servers with devices such as NDMe drives, GPUs, processors, and FPGAs in a way allows on-the-fly software-defined configuration.

The 24-port Microsemi PFX-based 1U cluster switch delivers 32 GT/s of non-blocking bandwidth per port at ultra low latency. The switch supports various configurations, where up to 4 ports can be combined into a single x16 / 128 GT/s port for higher bandwidth. Ports can be configured as 24 x4 ports, 12 x8 ports, 6 x16 ports, and various configurations of each. Multiple switches can be connected to create larger port counts.