Early this year, 3D printing startup Shapeways installed a new network from Cumulus Networks in its New York data center. Shapeways uses its data center infrastructure of around 100 servers to support its website and its large storage resource holding thousands of 3D images of customer printing projects. Its infrastructure is built largely on open source compute and storage, and it builds its own applications and updates them frequently, often 10 or more times a day.
The Cumulus network is controlled by the same Puppet code that Shapeways' engineers use to roll out application updates and reconfigure the infrastructure to support the apps. The result is that the entire infrastructure can be reconfigured automatically, in minutes, instead of having to go through a painstaking manual network modification each time. "Cumulus is allowing us to manage our network configuration with Puppet, the same way we manage our server configuration," says Shapeways engineer Martin Beauchamp. "That's really attractive to anybody who is practicing devops and interested in infrastructure as code."
Cumulus Network has just concluded a record first quarter, with business up 300%, according to Cumulus CEO Josh Leslie (at left in picture above) and CTO J.R. Rivers (at right). The company signed 86 new customers in the quarter, bringing the total customer roster to over 400. Earlier this year VP of Sales Leslie moved up to take over as CEO, as CEO and co-founder Rivers moved sideways into the CTO role. "We have a two year lead in a complete, robust, mature technology platform that is deployed at hundreds of customers," says Leslie.
Software-defined networking is maturing, with many of the startups originally grouped under that umbrella finding their own market and their own use cases. Cumulus is focused on the devops market, which is gaining in popularity as more service providers and enterprises move to the model of building, modifying, and deploying applications at speed. Cumulus's network operating system is based entirely on Linux, which makes it a perfect fit for devops organizations that generally use Linux-based applications and infrastructure software in most of their operations. Large networking companies, and most networking startups have their own proprietary network operating systems, which adds extra complexity to modifying the network as applications change. Says Rivers: "Customers want to control their operational journey. They want to pick a tool and make it super-efficient and easy. With other networking vendors, Puppet integration is not easy. With Cumulus, the customer has day-zero, no-cost integration with every Linux tool. That's an enormous advantage."
Shapeways' Beauchamp confirms the importance of Linux integration in building a modern, responsive infrastructure. He also highlights another advantage of a Cumulus network: price/performance. When Beauchamp joined Shapeways, its data center network was based on switches from Netgear (NTGR). A leader in the small office market, Netgear did not have the mission-critical robustness and reliability that Shapeways needed. Beauchamp made a network upgrade a priority. He discovered that with Cumulus he could build a Layer 3 network for less cost than he could build a Layer 2 network from Cisco (CSCO). A Layer 3 network allows for the creation of multiple subnets within the network, creating isolation that makes it harder for one networking problem to bring down the entire network. Since Cumulus sells software that runs on switches from any of a number of vendors, the combined hardware-software cost is well below that of the major brand names in networking. Beauchamp says he paid less than $100,000 for the network, and got the far superior functionality of a Layer 3 network. With a vendor like Cisco, not only would the gear have been more expensive, he probably would have needed a Cisco-trained networking engineer to manage it. With Cumulus, the existing engineering team can learn to manage the network since it uses the familiar Linux structure. "Now, a top-of-rack switch can fail without taking down any other part of the network," says Beauchamp.
With Cumulus, one is talking about the traditional challenges of networking, creating resilient, high-throughput, low-latency networks. During the SDN craze, several years ago, the conversation shifted to focus on network controllers that would use software to control multiple switches, or an entire network. That was the vision of the godfather of SDN, Martin Casado, and his company, Nicira. Its product, now known as the VMware NSX, was indeed based on a controller. J.R. Rivers argues that although Cumulus is deployed along with NSX at customers, and the two solutions work well together with Cumulus serving as the underlay, or network fabric, and NSX providing additional functionality as an overlay, the controller model is not a good solution, and other vendors have moved away from it.
"The controller has always been a flawed model," he says. "It has limitations on scale. Cumulus has deployments with tens of thousands of units at customers. A provisioning controller can't handle that kind of scale."
He adds that another reason Cumulus sales took off last year was that customers finally had a chance to appraise the Cisco ACI, Cisco's entry into the SDN sweepstakes. According to Rivers, customers looked at the ACI, which uses a controller-based architecture, and saw that it didn't offer the features of Cumulus, especially the Linux-friendly programming capability. "If you want a controller, you can get it there," he says. "If you want control, come to us."
Cumulus sells through partners, and it has strong partnerships with major hardware vendors including Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE), SuperMicro (SMCI), and Mellanox (MLNX). "We're extremely strategic for a company like Dell," says Leslie. "In a typical Cumulus deal, for every dollar we sell, Dell sells $5 or $10 worth of hardware." It's interesting to note that HP Enterprise and Dell will soon be in somewhat similar situations. After the split from the old Hewlett Packard, HP Enterprise seems to have found a new sense of energy and purpose. It's very strong in servers and storage, but its networking unit has never been a tier one networking player. Meanwhile, Dell is on track to complete its EMC acquisition later this year, after which it will have the world's largest set of storage products to add to its strong position in servers. But like HP Enterprise, its networking business is not tier one. Either of those companies could see Cumulus as a strategic acquisition. Naturally, Leslie and Rivers won't comment on such hypotheses. "The plan now is to go broad and take this technology mainstream," says Rivers. "Now, it's all about execution."
Leslie adds that he was recently at the offices of a new Cumulus customer in the health care business in New England. Their existing network is a traditional network dominated by Cisco and VMware. "The folks we met with told us: 'we just got a new CIO, and he said he wants us to be the AWS of healthcare. And he looked at our current infrastructure, and he said we won't get there with Cisco and VMware'."
