Recently, Nvidia announced its plans to acquire Cumulus Networks. Cumulus Networks is an open-source-centric company specializing in helping businesses optimize their data center networking stack. Cumulus Networks offers its own Linux distribution for network switches, plus tools for managing network operations. With Cumulus Express, Cumulus Networks also offers a hardware solution in the form of its data center switch.
Both companies did not state the price of the acquisition, but we can speculate that a considerable amount was given out, considering the fact that Cumulus has raised around US$134M since it was founded in 2010.
Cumulus had a previous partnership with Mellanox, which was recently acquired by Nvidia for US$6.9 billion. Amit Katz from Mellanox noted that the two companies first met back in 2013, and formed an official partnership in 2016. It is worth noting that Cumulus was an early player in the OpenStack ecosystem.
Having Mellanox and Cumulus in its stable will give Nvidia virtually almost every tool it needs to help businesses and cloud providers build out high-performance computing and AI workloads in data centers.
While most of us know Nvidia for providing us with graphics cards, the company has a big data center group, which delivered almost US$1 billion in revenue in the last quarter of the year, up 43% from the last year. In comparison, Nvidia's revenue from the gaming world was just under US$1.5 billion.
“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,” Katz wrote. “This open networking platform is extensible and allows enterprises and cloud-scale data centers full control over their operation,” he added.
