Cumulus Networks Inc., one of the numerous startups promising to help organizations automate the management of their rapidly growing traffic, hopes to stand out from the crowd with a new implementation of its switching software aimed at extending that control to one of the most overlooked parts of the grid: the out-of-band communications channels through which troubleshooting is performed.

The ability to carry out remote maintenance is indispensable in large environments where it’s unfeasible for administrators to sort out every issue in person, either because the scope of the task is too wide, the affected hardware is at a different location, or – often enough – both. But that access can be jeopardized when it’s the equipment supposed to handle requests that’s down, a risk that is usually addressed by implementing a separate network for operational work.

Such out-of-band arrangements are convenient not only for dealing with major outages but also for a wide range of more mundane operations that also involve taking the affected device offline, such as rolling out firmware updates. Yet the approach is not without its limitations, which the new Rack Management Platform (RMP) from Cumulus promises to help elevate.

The software is a modified version of its Linux-based operating system for in-band network equipment that has been specifically configured to run on the management switches tasked with supporting administrative tasks. The startup says that RMP allows organizations to implement a single set of controls across their entire networks, for troubleshooting as well as routine operations like monitoring performance.

That can go a long way towards simplifying maintenance considering the sheer number of devices in the typical enterprise environment – at least in theory. In practice, however, Cumulus’ vision for a unified management layer is limited by hardware support, since RMP only works with the 1GBe Arctica 4804ip switch from Penguin Computing Inc. on launch.

But that will most likely change in the foreseeable future considering the rate at which vendors have been lining up behind the startup  recently. Commodity hardware giant Super Micro Computer Inc. made its bare-metal switches compatible with Cumulus Linux only a few days ago, presumably in response to rivals such as Dell Inc. that have already done the same.

Photo by Bruno Cordloll vis Flickr