Cumulus Networks, the open networking software vendor, on Monday announced its first formal partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to put its open network OS on HPE’s StoreFabric M-Series Ethernet switches. The M-series switches will run Cumulus Linux and NetQ.

The Cumulus and HPE partnership brings the benefits of a modern Linux-based OS to HPE customers.

Cumulus Networks’ Partho Mishra

“We’ve been having discussions with HPE for about a year now. We’ve done all of the training for the HPE team so they’re ready to go to support these products,” Partho Mishra, president and chief product officer at Cumulus Networks, told Channel Futures.

With the continued growth of data and companies taking advantage of AI, analytics, data mining, 5G and IoT technologies, businesses need more options to handle the new demands being placed on the network. Performance intensive applications, in particular, require high performance, all-flash storage infrastructure with deeper levels of automation — and they need a networking solution to match. With this new partnership, Cumulus and HPE can provide organizations with an open, fully automated, and high-performance storage networking fabric needed in today’s modern data center, according to Cumulus.

The M-Series switches with Cumulus Linux and NetQ provide high bandwidth and low latency for a cost-effective solution to connect primary, secondary, hyperconverged, NAS or object storage systems, which HPE says are ideal for building an Ethernet Storage Fabric (ESF). In addition to being good for performance intensive applications, the solution is suitable for HPE’s broad base of enterprise applications.

“Storage networks built on M-series switches deliver high levels of performance and ultra-low latency,” said Marty Lans, general manager storage connectivity at HPE. “Adding Cumulus Linux and NetQ to the M-series now provides enterprises with greater network flexibility, increased scale, and deeper levels of automation making this a compelling solution for Ethernet Storage Fabrics.”

Cumulus recently announced that its open networking software for the data center – Cumulus Linux and NetQ 2.0, a network operations tool set – is available for the campus network. With that announcement, the vendor was targeting organizations looking to extend the benefits of open and disaggregated networking from their data centers to their campus networks, such as next-generation retail stores or remote branch offices.