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Cumulus Networks gives network admins a little DevOps loving

Rack management for the white box world

Cumulus Networks has launched a management config of its Linux network distro to give white-box sysadmins the kind of capabilities they're used to in the world of proprietary switches.

The Cumulus Rack Management Platform (RMP) OS is designed to provide a single “common interface and operational model” to users of white box devices such as Penguin Computing's Arctica 4804ip – the first off the blocks with the new OS.

As the company's William Choe explained to Vulture South, the deployment model the company has in mind is for RMP to be running on the generic management switch connected to the more sophisticated top-of-rack switches in a data centre.

That means “network-relevant” capabilities and services can run closer to the servers and their switches.

“It's designed so you can leverage your toolkits with consistent interfaces, [and RMP is] optimised out-of-the-box, preconfigured with the familiar Layer 2/Layer 3 settings,” he said.

Support for the IPMI out-of-band management protocol is also out-of-the-box, configuring the attached switches to dedicate a VLAN to management package.

He added that RMP has additional utility packages like DHCP and NTP.

A lot of data centre operators would, he said, run centralised servers for these functions, and that can be a problem at upgrade time when a lot of hosts are restarted and soak the servers.

By putting these services on the out-of-band management system, they can be distributed across multiple RMP servers to avoid that problem.

“Having a distributed approach also network admins can concentrate on isolated fault domains,” he added.

The company also announced that x86 heavyweight Supermicro has joined its Open Hardware program, and is now supporting Cumulus Linux on its bare metal switches. ®

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