This talk will address how the scalability of distributed database clusters is limited by the latency of the interconnect network. With Ethernet, all inter-node process-to-process communication passes through several protocol stacks. Given the short data packets in MySQL, the added latency and overhead effectively limits scalability of MySQL clusters running Ethernet or Infiniband. This is exemplified in the high performance, real time environments of Telecom. By using ultra low latency interconnect with Dolphin SuperSocketsTM, MySQL cluster performance and scalability is greatly improved.