Cumulus Networks, a Silicon Valley startup with a Linux operating system for data center networking and Silicon Valley superstar pedigree, came out of stealth Wednesday.

The company's technology enables IT to use bare-metal networking hardware, not being bound by the software incumbent switch vendors engineer their solutions around. This bare-metal gear comes from original design manufacturers (ODMs), including Quanta, Accton and Agema, and reportedly costs a lot less than products from the traditional big IT vendors.

Already in a large-scale commercial deployment with a major cloud provider (name not disclosed), Cumulus' product essentially enables IT teams who know Linux to use toolsets they know to administer both server and network infrastructure.

This is yet another sign that there is demand in the market for OS-agnostic network switches. Facebook is an example of a company that needs such a solution.

The social-network's director of technical operations Najam Ahmad told us in May that the company wanted to use open-source-based software on its network switches but could not. That month, Facebook kicked off an open-source design effort to build an OS-independent switch through the Open Compute Project – an open hardware and data center design community it started in 2011.

Facebook has designed its own servers and storage gear and uses a home-grown Linux-based operating system to manage that infrastructure. Its off-the-shelf networking gear does not allow for the same flexibility, however.

Peter Levine, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm and one of Cumulus' funding sources, said the firm was betting on a transformation of the data center from a hardware- to a software-centric world. “The recent announcement from Facebook’s Open Compute Project underscored this need for a Linux OS for networking,” he said.

“Clearly the need is massive. And the opportunities for enterprises and service providers to drive massive new efficiencies in the data center [are] massive as well.”

In Andreessen Horowitz's massive company portfolio is Nicira, a network-virtualization company sold to VMware for US$1.26bn last year. Levine said investment in Nicira addressed one key part of the transformation the firm believed was happening in the data center, and Cumulus provided another critical piece.

Three-year-old Cumulus, founded by former Cisco and VMware engineers, says its OS simplifies network orchestration, automation and monitoring. With Linux-based toolsets, clients can use automation tools like Chef or Puppet and monitoring tools like Ganglia and collectd.

It also works with overlay network virtualization technologies like VMware's.

One of Cumulus' founders, JR Rivers, who is also the company's CEO, has reportedly designed network gear for Google. Over the past several years, Cumulus has been working as a middle man between large data center end users and Asian ODMs, according to a report by Wired.

Both he and co-founder and CTO Nolan Leake have worked at Nuova Systems, a high-performance data center networking company Cisco bought in 2008. Rivers worked as a Cisco fellow from 2008 until 2010, when Cumulus was founded, as well as earlier, between 1995 and 2005, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Between his first run at Cisco and work at Nuova, he was an engineer at Google.

Cumulus has raised more than US$15m in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures and Peter Wagner, an independent venture investor. Four members of VMware's original founding team have also invested, according to Cumulus.