Dolphin's DX interconnect, comprising of PCI Express based hardware and accompanying software is an industry first solution for seamlessly integrating IO and clustering capabilities onto an enhanced PCI Express interconnect. This one of a kind solution eliminates the need for two distinct interconnects – one dedicated to IO and the other to clustering.The DX components can enable IO expansion in a single-host platform and provide clustering as well as IO expansion support in a multi-host platform. The hardware components of the DX solution consist of a (i) host adapter (ii) expansion switch and (iii) cluster switch. The software components provide the critical infrastructure for allowing legacy applications to run without the need for code rewrite or recompilation.??More specifically, the sockets direct interface in place (termed as SuperSockets) allows the TCP/IP stack to be completely bypassed and can be used in a transparent manner to enhance the performance of legacy socket applications.This paper evaluates the performance of an integrated clustering and single host IO expansion platform using DX components.??Results show that the DX components add minimal overhead to bandwidth and latency from a single host IO expansion perspective.??From a clustering perspective, preliminary results using the SuperSockets approach show a 1-byte packet latency of ~2?s for TCP/IP/socket based applications – an order of magnitude lower than what is currently available. The paper also evaluates a prototype gateway model that builds upon the combined single-host IO expansion and clustering feature thereby obviating the need for additional bridging components. Such a gateway model permits hosts in the cluster to have seamless connectivity to external networks through centralized network IO adapters.