Scott Ciccone

Author Archives: Scott Ciccone

Modernizing your network has never been easier with Cumulus NetQ Lifecycle Management

Upgrade and configuration management with push button simplicity

Network operations is all about keeping the network running smoothly and without problems. It includes monitoring the network for performance problems and faults, as well as fixing problems before they affect end users, or at least in the timeliest manner possible. Managing network assets correctly is critical to avoiding application-impacting network outages, performance degradation and security incidents.

However, network operators often struggle with operational challenges such as network disruptions caused by maintenance and configuration changes. Furthermore, business networks are often fairly large and complex, which means the set of tasks a network administrator will need to perform can quickly overwhelm manual efforts. This requires a shift, not only to modern networking, but also to modern operational tools as well.

To help solve these issues, Cumulus Networks has added new lifecycle management (LCM) capabilities to Cumulus NetQ 3.0, offering a simple GUI-driven workflow for provisioning, operating, maintaining and retiring network switches running Cumulus Linux.

Figure 1: NetQ Lifecycle Management

With the addition of full lifecycle management functionality, NetQ 3.0 now combines the ability to easily upgrade, configure and deploy network elements with a full suite of operations capabilities, such as visibility, Continue reading

Cumulus Networks 4th-Generation open, modern networking for applications of the future

The dynamics of IT are changing, especially when it comes to the demands on the network. As many have predicted, big data, mobile and the Internet of Things are putting significant and ever-increasing pressure on the network. Most networks and legacy management tools, therefore, are unprepared for the added stress placed on already-fragile infrastructures while the rest of the data center has sped ahead.

As more and more data is created and transferred between resources, the network must be increasingly resilient, dynamic and agile to adjust to application demands accordingly. As data and applications become increasingly distributed, there is an inherent architectural dependence on the interconnect, which enables these resources to work in concert to deliver application workloads. That interconnect, the network, must undergo its own transformation to meet the new needs of a modern network.

Our founders at Cumulus Networks recognized the challenges that were mounting nearly a decade ago and set out to build a more modern network, one that is modeled from the web-scale giants including Google, Amazon, and Facebook to better address applications of the future.

I’m very happy to announce that Cumulus Networks is now enabling customers to meet modern network challenges with our 4th-Generation Continue reading

How inspiration from your data center can modernize your campus network.

Campus networks are undergoing a rapid evolution as they draw inspiration from their data center peers from both a technology and cost perspective. At the forefront of this evolution is open networking, led by innovation and cost efficiencies that apply equally across data center and campus networks.

Interestingly, Cumulus Linux was originally intended for data center networking, but without a doubt, we’re seeing the lines between data center and campus blurring with campus standing to benefit significantly, and it’s about time. It’s the data center that has historically benefited from innovation, especially in compute and storage. The data center network, however, seemed to lag for more than a decade until our founders set out in 2010 to develop a fundamentally different approach to the data center with Cumulus Networks.

Cumulus Networks introduced an open, modern and innovative network operating system called Cumulus Linux. Cumulus Linux was originally designed to emulate the network architecture of the web-scale giants including Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook allowing you to automate, customize and scale your data center network like no other, and for the first time, bringing this capability to the masses.

Cumulus Networks is building the modern data center network for applications Continue reading

Minipack Highlight Video from OCP Summit

Minipack is an open, modular super spine switch and is the most recent addition to the industry’s open modular switches. Paired with the flexibility and cost benefits of Cumulus Linux OS, the platform is ideal for deploying the next generation of high-capacity data center fabrics. Based on Broadcom’s StrataXGS Tomahawk III Switch Series, Minipack is more powerful than other chassis while occupying a smaller footprint.

Together, Cumulus Networks and Edgecore Networks are bringing the hyperscale that was once only available to the largest enterprises to an entirely new segment of the market with Minipack.

Listen to Brian Sullivan, Sr Director of Product Management at Cumulus Networks and Michael Lane, VP of Business Development at Edgecore Networks as they discuss the recently launched Minipack, open, modular switch.

Minipack Announcement Blog
Minipack Datasheet
Edgecore Networks Minipack launch Press Release
Please let me know if you have any comments or questions, or via Twitter at @CicconeScott.

Cumulus NetQ Reinvented

When it comes to visibility into the health of your network. telemetry is all the rage these days. Even so, many customers are still plowing through old SNMP and Flow data to try to piece together what went wrong in their network with no easy way to back the clock up to a time before something broke your spine or leaf! Network downtime is usually costly and for many customers, large and small, can be mission critical.

With these and many other reasons in mind, I’m really excited to introduce Cumulus NetQ. With NetQ, Cumulus Networks has reinvented, from the ground up, our original NetQ product to include a long list of very useful features that are sure to make NetQ a Network Operators best friend.

Figure 1: Cumulus NetQ Benefits

NetQ is a highly-scalable, modern network operations toolset that provides visibility into and troubleshooting of your overlay and underlay networks in real-time. NetQ, delivers actionable insights and operational intelligence about the health of your network and your Linux-based data center — from the container, virtual machine, or host, all the way to the switch and port. In short, NetQ provides holistic, real-time intelligence about your modern network.

So, what Continue reading

Cumulus Networks is Excited to Announce being the First to Power Facebook’s Next Generation, Open Modular Platform, Minipack

Cumulus Networks, the leader in building open, modern and scalable networks, announced at OCP Summit that Cumulus Linux is the first network operating system to fully support the Minipack next-generation modular switch platform. Developed by Edgecore and contributed by Facebook to the Open Compute Project, Minipack empowers organizations of all sizes to architect, design and scale their infrastructure with unprecedented flexibility, capacity and interoperability.

Figure 1: Minipack Modular Chassis

Minipack is a modular switch platform, which means together, Cumulus Networks and Edgecore are bringing the benefits of web-scale networking to the mainstream. Minipack follows the open networking principles of disaggregation that allow customers to maintain consistent automated provisioning across all their switches of different form-factors (fixed or chassis).

Minipack leverages the latest ASIC technology from Broadcom including the Tomahawk III, the industry’s highest performance switch silicon. Compared to its predecessor, Backpack, Minipack is ½ the height, uses ½ the power and offers equivalent capacity making it one of the most operationally efficient open networking data center spine switches available today.

Additionally, Minipack offers either 100GE or 400GE options with Field Replaceable Port Interface Modules (PIM)’s in the following form factors:

Cumulus Networks Named to CRN Data Center 50

Cumulus Networks is proud to announce CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has named us to its 2019 Data Center 50 list.

This annual list identifies technology suppliers that offer the right management tools to help businesses and solution providers ensure data centers run with maximum performance and efficiency. We couldn’t be more thrilled! This accomplishment really solidifies our vision — to build the modern data center networks for applications of the future.

It’s been a while since we updated our blog community with our evolved vision for the modern data center, so we thought this would be a great opportunity to review a little bit about what Cumulus has been doing lately and how our products have evolved.

Our story — Building the modern data center

We pride ourselves on providing networking software to design, run and operate modern data centers that are simple, open, resilient, scalable and operationally efficient.

Our network operating system, Cumulus Linux, is a powerful, open network operating system that allows you to automate, customize and scale using web-scale principles like the world’s largest data centers.

When it comes to data center networks, traditional network solutions are unable keep up with the pace of Continue reading