Cumulus Networks was founded by JR Rivers and Nolan Leake in 2010. The company raised a first round of seed funding in 2012. Cumulus Networks emerged publicly in June 2013 after previously operating in stealth mode. The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Peter Wagner and 4 of the 5 original VMware founders. In 2014 Dell made a deal with Cumulus to offer the option of the Cumulus Linuxnetwork OS with their switches. In 2015, Hewlett Packard Enterprise made a deal with Cumulus Networks to offer Cumulus Linux on their Altoline switches. In 2016, Mellanox made a deal with Cumulus Networks to offer Cumulus Linux on their Spectrum switches. In 2018, Lenovo made a deal with Cumulus networks to offer Cumulus Linux on their ThinkSystem Rackswitch line of switches. On June 20, 2019, the company announced the departure of co-founder JR Rivers, who had been the original CEO and, since March 2016, the CTO. According to the company's website, neither Rivers nor Leake remain on the Board of Directors. On May 4, 2020, Nvidia Corporation announced plans to acquire Cumulus Networks for an undisclosed amount.
Products
Cumulus Linux
Cumulus Linux is an open source Linux based networking operating system for bare metal switches. It is based on Debian. In a 2017 Gartner report Cumulus Networks was highlighted as a pioneer of open source networking. Gartner drew attention to the fact that Cumulus Networks had developed an open source networking operating system in a market where hardware vendors delivered proprietary operating systems pre-installed. According to Gartner, Cumulus Networks had worked around the lack of vendor support for open source networking by deploying bare metal switches with the Cumulus Linux operating system in large corporate networks. 32 percent of the Fortune 50 companies used the Cumulus Linux operating system in their data centers in 2017.
NetQ
NetQ is a fabric-wide telemetry-based validation system that enables organizations to validate network state, both during regular operations and for post-mortem diagnostic analysis.
Host Pack
Host Pack includes software essentials that brings the host to the network through NetQ and FRRouting. Host Pack focuses on trying to enhance network visibility through NetQ’s end-to-end fabric validation, and on trying to promote network connectivity through FRRouting’s open source routing protocol. It enables the host to be part of the layer 3 network, while supporting layer 2 overlay networks.
In 2012 Cumulus initiated the open network install environment project. The Open Compute Project turned ONIE into an initiative to define an open source install environment for bare metal network switches. A network switch with a ONIE install environment gives data centers the choice of network operating system. Therefore ONIE allows for a business model where networking hardware is disaggregated from the operating system. The Cumulus Linux operating system can be installed on all ONIE compliant switches, such as the Lenovo ThinkSystem RackSwitch series.
