Mellanox Technologies is offering its newest line of Ethernet switches — the Spectrum line, covering 10-, 25-, 40-, 50-, and 100-Gb/s line speeds — with the Cumulus Linux operating system running on top.

The first named customer is Cloudalize, which was looking for high-performance networking that could be provisioned as easily as servers. With Cumulus Linux, Cloudalize can use many of its server tools to automate its network orchestration and monitoring activities.

Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox, says, “With Cumulus we’re doing an open Ethernet box. We’ve disaggregated the switches with the software. We want to bring Web-scale IT efficiency into more modest data centers.”

“Last year it was all about 10- and 40-Gb/s networks,” says William Choe, VP of products and alliances at Cumulus Networks.

But, “the 25 is the new 10," notes Deierling. “The faster the storage needs, the faster the networks. Today 10-Gb/s is dominant, but we see that changing very rapidly.”

In November 2015, Mellanox announced that its SwitchX-2 switches had been accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP). Today's announcement is arriving just before the OCP Summit, to be held in San Jose, Calif.

However, the newer Spectrum switches are not yet officially accepted by OCP. They are however running multiple network operating systems on top of Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), which was developed and accepted by OCP.

Mellanox also today unveiled its ConnectX-4 Lx adapters for the OCP. The contributions include single and multihost versions of both the ConnectX-4 and ConnectX-4 Lx adapters for 25-, 50-, and 100-Gb/s Ethernet, offering backwards compatibility with existing fiber infrastructure.

Today's announcement adds one more systems vendor to Cumulus's partner list, which includes Dell, Edge-Core, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Quanta Cloud Technology, and Super Micro Computer.