NVIDIA acquires Cumulus Networks

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Cumulus Networks

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NVIDIA announced that it has acquired Cumulus Networks, bolstering their networking software capabilities. The combination enables 'the accelerated, software-defined data centre', Amit Katz, Mellanox's Vice President Ethernet Switch writes in a blog post.

With Cumulus, NVIDIA can innovate and optimize across the entire networking stack from chips and systems to software including analytics like Cumulus NetQ, delivering high performance and value to customers. The open networking platform is extensible and allows enterprise and cloud-scale data centres full control over their operations.

Cumulus, based in Mountain View, Calif., supports more than 100 hardware platforms with Cumulus Linux, its operating system for network switches. The NVIDIA Mellanox Spectrum switches already ship with Cumulus Linux and SONiC, the open-source offering forged in Microsoft’s Azure cloud and managed by the Open Compute Project.

The courtship began in 2013, when Mellanox was forming its Open Ethernet strategy.

Mellanox, who was acquired by NVIDIA earlier this year, heard the call for open networks from the world’s largest cloud service providers seeking greater simplicity. At the OCP Summit in March 2016, Mellanox announced a partnership with Cumulus and started shipping combined offerings.

Today, the ONIE environment Cumulus created is a software foundation for Mellanox’s bare-metal switches. Together they've built DENT, a distributed Linux software framework for retail and other enterprises at the edge of the network. And their Onyx operating system continues to expand, especially in Ethernet Storage Fabrics (ESF).

NVIDIA’s approach to creating both the hardware and software for accelerated computing expands deeper into networking software with Cumulus. In the announcement Amit Katz, Vice President Ethernet Switch at Mellanox writes: "The ability to innovate across the entire technology stack will help us deliver performance at scale for the accelerated, software-defined data centre."

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