After Mellanox, Nvidia Purchases Cumulus Networks

Following the purchase of Mellanox Corp., NVIDIA Corp. announced the acquisition of Cumulus Networks, Inc., a networking software provider.

Cloud data centers are evolving to an architecture that is accelerated, disaggregated and software-defined to meet the growth in AI and HPC. To build these modern data centers, HPC and networking hardware and software must go hand in hand.

Nvidia announced plan to acquire Cumulus Networks, bolstering its networking software capabilities. The combination enables the new era of the accelerated, software-defined data center.

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

Cumulus, based in Mountain View, CA, supports more than 100 hardware platforms with Cumulus Linux, its OS for network switches.

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Fast 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 heard the call for open networks from large 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, NVIDIA built DENT, a distributed Linux software framework for retail and other enterprises at the edge of the network. And 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. The ability to innovate across the entire technology stack will help to deliver performance at scale for the accelerated, software-defined data center.