Cumulus Networks, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its Linux operating system for data center networking.
Cumulus Linux, which is already in large-scale commercial deployment with one of the world’s biggest cloud providers, aims to enable the “Linux Revolution for Networking,” helping to make data center infrastructure higher capacity, less complex and affordable. Cumulus said it implementation will enable customers to take advantage of the price-performance of so-called “industry-standard” or “bare- metal” hardware as well as the agility and automation of the new generation of “software-defined” data center software and native Linux-based toolsets. Cumulus Linux promises radically simplified orchestration, automation and monitoring of networks.
It supports tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ganglia and collectd. Cumulus also works with overlay network technologies such as network virtualization from VMware. Because it sits at the edge of the network, Cumulus Linux also allows for routing between physical and virtual servers.
The company also cited DreamHost and Fastly as early customers.
“Linux revolutionized the compute-side of the datacenter over the past 15 years. Having a common OS broke vendor lock-in, drove down server hardware cost, allowed scale-out architectures, and provided a common platform for innovations like virtualization. Meanwhile networking remained stagnant,” said JR Rivers, co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Networks. “Innovation is finally coming to the network, and we are bringing that same transformational impact that Linux has had on datacenter economics and innovation to the networking side of the house.”
- Cumulus Networks was founded by veteran networking engineers from Cisco and VMware in 2010.
- The company has raised over $15 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Peter Wagner and four of the original VMware founders.
