Nvidia acquires Cumulus to bolster networking software capabilities

May 04, 2020

Nvidia on Monday announced its plans to acquire Cumulus Networks, an open networking software company founded in 2010. The purchase comes on the heels of Nvidia’s $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox, an interconnection vendor that’s shipped combined offerings with Cumulus since 2016.

The terms of the Cumulus deal were not disclosed.

“Nvidias’s approach to creating both the hardware and software for accelerated computing expands deeper into networking software with Cumulus,” wrote Amit Katz, VP of Ethernet Switch at Mellanox, in a blog post. “The ability to innovate across the entire technology stack will help us deliver performance at scale for the accelerated, software-defined data center.”

Cumulus says it has more than 1,800 customers, including 30% of the Fortune 50. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company supports more than 100 hardware platforms with Cumulus Linux, its operating system for network switches. Mellanox’s Spectrum switches already ship with Cumulus Linux. The two companies also worked together to build DENT, a distributed Linux software framework for the network edge, as well as the Onyx operating system.

Cumulus was also behind ONIE, an Open Compute Project open-source initiative that defines an open “install environment” for bare metal network switches. Mellanox uses the ONIE environment as a foundation for its switches.