Cumulus and Nutanix Integrate HCI, Open Networking

Cumulus and Nutanix partnered on an integrated product that combines Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack with Cumulus’ open networking software. The new systems, available now, deploy Cumulus NetQ on switches and Nutanix AHV nodes. NetQ is the vendor’s telemetry-based fabric validation system that monitors the network and ensures it is behaving as intended. Nutanix’s HCI makes compute and storage more flexible and scalable, said Cumulus CEO Josh Leslie. “But it still gets complicated when you get into the networking piece,” he said. “If you buy six or eight or 20 nodes of Nutanix infrastructure, you still have to connect them to each other and back to some broader network.” This is where Cumulus’s software comes into play. “We allow Nutanix users and systems to automatically connect when Cumulus systems are present,” Leslie said “We built integration that allows our switches to automatically see the Nutanix nodes and automatically create all the connections required.”