 | |
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Networking software,Cloud Networking |
| Founded | January 2010; 15 years ago (2010-01) |
| Founders | JR Rivers Nolan Leake |
| Headquarters | , US |
Key people | Josh Leslie (CEO) |
| Products | Operating System forSwitches |
| Parent | Nvidia |
| Website | cumulusnetworks |
Cumulus Networks was acomputer software company headquartered inMountain View, California, US. The company designed and sold aLinuxoperating system fornetwork switches, along with management software use inenterprise environments.
In May 2020, American semiconductor manufacturerNvidia announced it was acquiring Cumulus.[1]
Cumulus Networks was founded by JR Rivers and Nolan Leake in 2010. The company raised a first round of seed funding in 2012.[2] Cumulus Networks emerged publicly in June 2013[3] after previously operating in stealth mode.[4][5][6]
In 2014Dell began offering the option of the Cumulus Linux network OS on Dell's switches.[7]
In 2015,Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) began offering the option of Cumulus Linux on HPE's switches.[8]
In 2016, Mellanox began offering Cumulus Linux on their Spectrum switches.[9]
In 2018,Lenovo began offering Cumulus Linux on their ThinkSystem Rackswitch line of switches.[10]
On June 20, 2019, the company announced the departure of co-founder JR Rivers, who had been the original CEO and, since March 2016, theCTO.[11] According to the company's website, neither Rivers nor Leake remain on the Board of Directors.
In January 2020, Hewlett Packard announced a partnership with Cumulus to include Cumulus' Linux NetQ software on HPE's network storage products.[12]
In May 2020, Nvidia Corporation announced plans to acquire Cumulus Networks for an undisclosed amount.[1]
Cumulus Linux was their open Linux-basednetworking operating system forbare metal switches. It's been based on theDebian Linux distribution.[13]
In a 2017Gartner report Cumulus Networks was highlighted as a pioneer ofopen source networking for developing an open source networking operating system in a market where hardware vendors usually 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 theirdata centers in 2017.[14]