Cisco unveils Nexus HyperFabric AI clusters with NVIDIA

The announcement was made within the framework of the Cisco Live event on June 4. 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 AI 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.

According to Cisco’s recent Global Networking Trends Report, in the next two years, 60 per cent of IT leaders and professionals expect to deploy AI-enabled predictive network automation across all domains to better manage NetOps. Additionally, 75 per cent plan to deploy tools that offer end-to-end visibility via a single console into different network domains including campus and branch, WAN, data centre, internet, public clouds, and industrial networks.

“While the promise of AI is clear, the path forward for many just starting out is not. Customers often face economic and operational challenges to get an AI stack up and running,” said Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco Networking. “Cisco is committed to making the deployment and operation of AI infrastructure simpler. Together with NVIDIA, we are delivering a simple-to-deploy, cloud-operated AI-stack solution for on-premises deployments that builds on our Cisco Networking Cloud platform vision for automation and simplicity.”

“Generative AI requires purpose-built infrastructure and software that enables enterprises to securely turn their data into fuel for business transformation,” said Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of networking at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA and Cisco are providing an enterprise-ready AI platform and control plane to simplify deployment of the accelerated computing, networking and, software needed for generative AI workloads.”

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.

The on-premises solution features a single place to design, deploy, monitor, and assure the AI pods and data centre 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 centres, 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

Select customers may have early trial access to this AI solution in the fourth quarter of 2024, with general availability expected shortly thereafter.

Cisco 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 specialisations 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.

“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 Datacentre Switching and Software Ops solutions,” said Vijay Bhagavath, research vice president of 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 centres 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 organisations can seamlessly build and scale their AI operations," said Renen Hallak, CEO and co-founder of VAST Data.

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