Today Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), the leader in security and networking, announced a breakthrough AI cluster solution with NVIDIA for the data center that transforms how customers build, manage and optimize infrastructure and software.
Delivering on the Cisco Networking Cloud vision to simplify networking, Cisco is bringing to market a new enterprise-ready, end-to-end infrastructure solution to scale generative AI workloads. The Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AIอ cluster solution combines Cisco AI-native networking with NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI software, and a robust VAST data store. It is designed to enable customers to focus on AI-driven innovation and new revenue opportunities rather than IT management.
At Cisco Live, the company is demonstrating how it is committed to helping its customers quickly deploy AI infrastructure. Cisco is also putting the right tools in the hands of its customers to build intuitive AI-native networks, anticipate failures and quickly diagnose and remediate problems.
How Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI Cluster Works
The solution features a single place to design, deploy, monitor and assure the AI pods and data center workloads. It guides users from design, to validated deployment, to monitoring and assurance for enterprise-ready AI infrastructure. With its cloud management capabilities, customers can easily deploy and manage large scale fabrics across data centers, colocation facilities and edge sites.
The Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI cluster solution offers automated, cloud-managed operations across a unified compute and networking fabric combining Cisco's Ethernet switching expertise founded on Cisco Silicon One, integrated with NVIDIA's accelerated computing and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, and VAST's data storage platform. This will include:
- Cisco cloud management capabilities to simplify IT operations across all phases of the workflow.
- Cisco Nexus 6000 series switches for spine and leaf that deliver 400G and 800G Ethernet fabric performance.
- Cisco Optics family of QSFP-DD modules to offer customer choice and deliver super high densities.
- NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to streamline the development and deployment of production-grade generative AI workloads
- NVIDIA NIM inference microservices that accelerate the deployment of foundation models while ensuring data security, and are available with NVIDIA AI Enterprise
- NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs starting with the NVIDIA H200 NVL, designed from the ground up to supercharge generative AI workloads with game-changing performance and memory capabilities.
- NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing unit DPU processor and BlueField-3 SuperNIC for accelerating AI compute networking, data access and security workloads.
- Enterprise reference design for AI built on NVIDIA MGX, a modular and flexible server architecture.
- The VAST Data Platform, which offers unified storage, database and a data-driven function engine built for AI.
Availability
Select customers may have early trial access to this AI solution in Q4 of CY 2024, with general availability expected shortly thereafter.
Introducing AI Skills for Partners and IT ProsCisco Learning and Certifications has introduced a new CCDE AI Infrastructure certification, with training available now on Cisco U. It provides expert-level Network Engineers and Design Network Engineers with the expertise to translate AI workload business requirements into technical and sustainable best practices for infrastructure design. Cisco has also launched the first stage of its AI partner specializations from Cisco Black Belt. These learning journeys equip Cisco partners with the product knowledge needed to help them build AI practices and accelerate their customer deployments.
Supporting Comments
"The Nexus HyperFabric AI cluster solution is competitively differentiated and leverages Cisco's overall portfolio strength, new cloud-managed subscriptions model, and the Cisco-NVIDIA partnership, among other aspects, for capturing wallet share in Enterprise AI Datacenter Switching and Software Ops solutions." - Vijay Bhagavath, Research Vice President, IDC
"Generative AI models demand lightning-fast access to vast amounts of data, a feat only achieved through unprecedented computing power and high-performance networking infrastructure. With the new Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI cluster solution, we are helping enterprises build AI data centers with NVIDIA accelerated computing and AI software and Cisco networking, and the VAST Data Platform, providing end-to-end visibility of compute, networking, storage and data management so organizations can seamlessly build and scale their AI operations. - Renen Hallak, CEO and co-founder of VAST Data
"Cisco compute and networking solutions are integral to powering PTC's R&D, data center performance, connectivity, and our Servigistics software to deliver the AI-powered service supply chain capabilities for our customers across industries, helping them better estimate, predict, optimize, and improve service supply chain performance. Cisco's new AI infrastructure solution with NVIDIA opens more possibilities for PTC to scale our data center infrastructure easily and efficiently, enhance operations and performance, and help meet our sustainability goals." - Michael Blake, VP of Information Technology at PTC
"Ethernet has the broadest scale in our client base, and the Cisco NVIDIA partnership and resulting offers will accelerate our ability to deliver AI solutions to our clients. Both Cisco and NVIDIA are already a significant part of WWT's AI Proving Ground lab where we help clients select and operationalize AI architectures so they can more quickly turn their data into insights and action." - Neil Anderson, VP Cloud, Infrastructure, and AI Solutions, WWT