The HPE M-Series SN2410M Ethernet switch is a top-of-rack data center switch providing 10/25/100Gbit connectivity through its 48 SFP28 (10/25Gbit) ports and 8 QSFP28 (100Gbit) ports.
It can also optionally be purchased with only half of the ports active (24 of the of the 48 SFP28 ports and 4 of the 8 QSFP28 ports), a license can then be purchased & applied in-life to activate the remaining ports when needed: this reduces initial capital expenditure and means that when the full switch capacity is required, a brand new switch isn’t needed.
The M-Series brand comes from 2017 when HPE and Mellanox entered a strategic partnership where it was announced that “The Mellanox Ethernet Storage Fabric [ESF] will power HPE StoreFabric M-Series switches, to again provide 25, 50, and 100 Gb/s connectivity”. This is prior to Nvidia acquiring Mellanox for $6.9 billion in 2019.
The switches run the Mellanox Onyx operating system (OS). In 2020, Nvidia acquired Cumulus Networks (Wikipedia link). Based on Debian, Cumulus Linux was created to bring Software Defined Networking (SDN) to bare-metal switches. Cumulus Networks also created the Open Network Install Environment – a Linux bootloader to enable the installation of network os’s (such as Cumulus itself) as part of the SDN concept. Why is this important? In 2024, Nvidia announced that they would sunset the Mellanox Onyx OS in favour of Cumulus. This guide provides a demonstration of the process for converting Onyx to Cumulus: how_to_migrate_from_ONYX_to_CUMULUS_LINUX–2354950.mp4
A final note particularly for customers with existing HPE SN2410M switches running Onyx. The documentation on HPE’s Website (link) states “HPE ONIE switch SKUs are intended for customer installation of NVIDIA® Cumulus® or another NOS and cannot be converted to ONYX switch SKUs under any circumstances. HPE switch SKUs with factory installed ONYX cannot be converted to HPE ONIE switch SKUS and do not support NVIDIA® Cumulus® or any other NOS”