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

Their Open Ethernet strategy spreads its wings with a pioneer of hyperscale networking.

NVIDIA provides the leading accelerated computing platform. Mellanox is the high-performance networking leader, now part of NVIDIA in a combination described in their founder and CEO’s welcome letter.

With Cumulus, NVIDIA can innovate and optimize across the entire networking stack from chips and systems to software including analytics like Cumulus NetQ, delivering great 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, Calif., supports more than 100 hardware platforms with Cumulus Linux, its operating system for network switches. Their ultrafast 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 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, we 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).

Cumulus Linux is the only open network OS that allows you to affordably build and efficiently operate your network like the world’s largest data center operators, unlocking web-scale networking for businesses of all sizes.

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 us deliver performance at scale for the accelerated, software-defined data center.

NVIDIA is saying they are delighted to join forces with Cumulus and look forward to the innovations we’ll deliver to customers together.

Complete web-scale environment

With a Cumulus Linux based, scale-out approach, the entire networking stack follows the same design principles as compute to focus on scale-out, simplicity and automation readiness. The consumption model of an integrated stack through “Data Center in a Rack” can be easily driven through the hyperconverged solutions with open networking to help customers deploy web-scale architectures with ease.

A partnership for best-in-class hyper converged infrastructure

Nutanix has emerged as a best-in-class HCI solution, receiving high marks from analysts for both strength of product offering and long-term strategy. Nutanix leverages commodity server hardware to collapse independent services into a single converged platform, optimizing both computing and storage infrastructures.

Cumulus Networks and Nutanix have partnered on a comprehensive solution that automates network connectivity, simplifies procurement and speeds problem resolution.