Advancing networking hardware for over 27 years, Interface Masters provides U.S. designed and manufactured solutions, complete and ready for our customers Linux software load . The Silicon Valley OEM’s best-in-class team is made up of design engineers, project managers and operations professionals, designing, tracking and testing solutions. Driven by emerging technologies and developments, these advancements are often found in process and engineering improvements, engineering architectural expertise, and experience across nearly all CPU and switch fabric technologies.
Constant Product Improvement
Advancements in networking hardware are directly related to constant improvements. While new technologies alone may be enough to do so, it is the dedication to the project process and innovation within the engineering team that provides the constant means to improve and advance.
The criticality of constantly improving project processes within the team must be present. A flexible project process allows for immediate, consistent execution on complex and changing designs, and equates to networking hardware development success. Additionally, this process plays a key role in ensuring accuracy, reliability and timely delivery.
With a collective 250 years of hardware design experience, Interface Masters’ engineering team readily takes on increasingly complex designs. Their designs face many challenges and demand creative approaches to complex advancements, integrating multi-core (up to 64-Core) processors, faster clock speed CPUs (Marvell™, AMD, Intel® and NXP™) and implementing a variety of feature-rich modular and semi-modular hardware.
Recent examples of improvement include two new approaches to offloading data processing, x86 Intel-based DataSlammer™ technology and advanced Nvidia GPU modules improving data management within compute intensive tasks with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Assured Engineering Expertise
With a design team that adheres to each project’s hardware requirements and employs its expertise to each solution detail, achieving and advancing networking hardware. This team of experts is responsible for overall appliance and switch functionality, data management upgrades, designing in new processors, ensuring thermal protection, integrating FIPS and HSM (Hardware Security Module) security protection and more. The team provides expert support for MIPS, ARM, and x86 architectures. Expertise is required to achieve the accurate design and board layout ready for manufacturing, testing and certification success.
Not just an improvement, Intel-based DataSlammer offload processing exemplifies the team’s expertise in elevating it to a standard feature for Interface Masters’ appliances with offload processing This expertise enabled a performance feature that made the Tahoe 8830 and Tahoe 8828, two of their most inquired about solutions. The team went one step further and expertly designed in the option accommodating an Nvidia GPU option and bringing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to deal with resource-intensive tasks.
The engineering teams’ expertise extends to ANSYS Power Integrity (PI) testing simulations, ANSYS Signal Integrity (SI) simulations, ANSYS thermal simulations, complex mechanical design, and power design, and all switch fabrics. The team’s experience and expertise extend reliable, long-life, high-performance, guaranteed certified ready-to-load networking hardware to Fortune 100 and other forward thinking companies.
The team’s capabilities and approach allow partners working with Interface Masters on custom designs to focus on their expertise—developing the software—while Interface Masters focuses on developing the hardware.
Matching Processors to Solutions
Advanced networking hardware technology must meet current and future enterprise applications (e.g., network security appliance, Artificial Intelligence, offload processing, SD-WAN, Edge computing and more) often demanding faster processors, increased functionality and manageable power requirements.
Match the right processor with the appliance points toward success. Networking applications demand higher clock speeds and multi-core processors combining for system performance improvements, and while high performance, they don’t always translate to a solution match. Interface Masters develops complete hardware solutions matched with our partners’ hardware specifications and their enterprise software needs to ensure success.
Frequently it is the partner’s hardware specifications, appliance function and ultimately the software that will dictate the processors for consideration. In many cases, designs the engineering team have worked on previously will provide insights into a processor best match. Interface Masters’ capabilities in matching designs with processors has resulted in 68+ different designs. These designs include processor matches with main system processing like Marvell’s OCTEON CN98XX family, multi-processing like the AMD EPYC™ server processors, and processors like Intel’s x86 COM Express modules for key functionality in subsystems and control panels.
Selecting a particular processor can set the tone for the appliance resulting in a design with a more advanced approach. To illustrate this, let’s consider that soon Interface Masters will be releasing an AMD EPYC-based dual-processor switching appliance with a processor combination that matches the system for a very advanced switch solution that will meet a variety of secure, highly advanced, enterprise and data center applications. The right processor matched with the right design meets need and advanced networking hardware.