Nvidia Announces it Will Acquire Cumulus Networks

On Monday chipmaker Nvidia announced that it will be acquiring California-based Cumulus Networks, an open-source-centric company that specializes in helping enterprises optimize their data center networking stack.

The company stated in a press release, “Today we announce our plan to acquire Cumulus Networks, bolstering our networking software capabilities. The combination enables the new era of the accelerated, software-defined data center.”

Cumulus offers both its own Linux distribution for network switches, as well as tools for managing network operations. With Cumulus Express, the company also offers a hardware solution in the form of its own data center switch.

No price was given for the transaction but Cumulus had raised $134 million since it was founded in 2010.
Cumulus already had a previous partnership with Mellanox. Nvidia acquired the company for $6.9 billion and closed on the acquisition recently.

Mellanox’s Amit Katz has wrote, “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.”

Nvidia remarked, “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. We’re delighted to join forces with Cumulus and look forward to the innovations we’ll deliver to customers together.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) and have not been compensated for this article.