Dell has opened two of its data center switches to having the Linux-based operating system by the networking startup Cumulus installed on them.

The vendor announced a partnership with Cumulus, whereby it will act as a reseller of the software, offering it as an option for its S6000 and S4810 top-of-rack switches.

For Dell, the deal is a big step outside of the norm among the big networking vendors, who have traditionally sold hardware that was limited to running their own proprietary operating software.

Cumulus, founded by former Cisco and VMware engineers, came out of stealth in June of last year. The company's product enables IT administrators who know Linux to use the toolsets they have and know to administer both servers and network.

JR Rivers, CEO and co-founder of Cumulus, said fundamentally, if someone bought a piece of hardware for their data center they should be able to put whatever software they want on it. Most operators, however, do not have that luxury today, stuck with whatever software their network gear came with.

Not only is Cumulus giving companies the option of putting a Linux based operating system on bare-metal switches, it enables them to buy those switches from original design manufacturers without the mark-ups that Ciscos and Junipers of the world put on their price tags.

Mark Andreessen, one of the most prominent venture capitalists in high tech, named Cumulus as one of two companies that are leading the transformation that is starting in data center networking. The other one is Nicira, a software defined networking firm VMware bought last year for US$1.26bn.

Andreessen's firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has invested in both Cumulus and Nicira.

“We believe deeply in the structural change,” Andreessen said about the switch to software defined networking while sitting on a panel at the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, California, Wednesday.

The networking industry is going through the same process of standardization and virtualization that the server industry has gone through, he said.

What Cumulus is doing is the more difficult part of software defined networking: building the management software. Andy Bechtolsheim, chief development officer at Arista, also a software defined network company, said it made “a lot of sense to standardize network hardware.”

The software stack is a lot harder to build than it is to build networking hardware, he said, sitting on the same panel. “The hardware is actually not the difficult part.”