Two hot new startups are gearing up for an assault on the traditional networking paradigm. Wikibon senior analyst Stu Miniman examined each one and provided his take on their respective technologies in a recent entry on the Wikibon blog.

Cumulus Networks is an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that came out of stealth earlier this week. The company’s flagship offering is a network-optimized version of Linux that’s designed to run on low-cost commodity switches. Miniman highlights that the platform is not only compatible with standard hardware, but it’s also possible to run applications on top of it. This functionality is similar to what Pivotal, a spinoff that emerged from EMC and VMware, is trying to achieve.

Miniman notes that the biggest winner in the Linux ecosystem is not Red Hat or any other distributor, but Google, which based its business model on the open-source OS.

Insieme Networks is another player looking to disrupt the traditional network. The team is Cisco’s latest spin-in and as such it consists of alumni from the previous two: Andiamo, a provider of Fibre Channel switching solutions, and Nexus and UCS specialist Nuova. Insieme is not developing a storage solution, Miniman estimates, but it’s likely that the final product will offer some sort of storage integration. Cisco hasn’t confirmed this, but the company’s partner-centric storage strategy and the fact that Andiamo and Nuova support FC and FCoE respectively are good indications.

Miniman believes that Insieme will come out with a product that competes with 40Gb and 100Gb solutions from Arista and other rivals in this market. It’s possible that Cisco is taking a software-driven approach given its involvement in the OpenDaylight project.

Miniman concludes his piece with an overview of how open-source and SDN are transforming the market.

“As CIOs and IT organizations examine the transforming networking industry, it is not a simple decision of “open vs. closed” or “software vs. hardware,” but rather how IT can drive value for the business. Enterprise organizations look for solutions that can help save time and therefore services and ecosystems are needed for the open source solutions. There is general consensus that networking will undergo some seismic shifts over the next 5-10 years, but the winners are still to be determined.”