NVIDIA has acquired Cumulus Networks. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Cumulus, which was founded in 2010 by JR Rivers and Nolan Leake, developed a Linux-based operating system for network switches. The company signed licensing deals with Dell, HPE, Mellanox, and Lenovo. Cumulus is also known for its pioneering work with the open network install environment (ONIE) project. Investors in the company included Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Peter Wagner and 4 of the 5 original VMware founders. Cumulus is based in Mountain View, California.
NVIDIA said the combination of its recently-acquired Mellanox division with Cumulus Networks will enable a new era for accelerated, software-defined data centers.
NVIDIA's target is to "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."
Mellanox has been collaborating with Cumulus since 2013. 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.
NVIDIA acquires Mellanox - focus on Next Gen Data Centers
NVIDIA says that by combining its computing expertise with Mellanox’s high-performance networking technology, data center customers will achieve higher performance, greater utilization of computing resources and lower operating costs.
“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine.“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” said Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures. This combination will foster the creation of powerful technology and fantastic opportunities for our people.”
NVIDIA also promised to continue investing in Israel, where Mellanox is based.
The companies expect to close the deal by the end of 2019.
