Cisco Systems Inc. today introduced an expansion to its current lineup of rack-scale artificial intelligence solutions for massive AI workloads in secure AI factories, addressing growing needs for massive inference and training compute.
Through a partnership with Super Micro Computer Inc., Cisco announced an expanded portfolio of Secure AI Factory solutions with Nvidia Cloud Partner-compliant solutions for hyperscale, neocloud and sovereign clouds. It features the company’s Silicon One-based switches for the front end and builds on the company’s Nvidia Spectrum-X-based switches on the back end, unified by Nexus One, Cisco’s networking management platform.
“We are at the beginning of one of the largest datacenter buildouts in history,” President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said. “Every organization is racing to scale AI — but speed only counts if it comes with control of data, managed token costs and real return on investment.”
The company said it has also expanded its Enterprise Reference Architectures to include the latest generation for enterprise deployments. This will allow small deployments and large datacenter projects to rapidly spin up and prototype networking and rack-scale build-outs using Nvidia AI deployments with very little risk by tapping into well-known expertise and best practices.
As is already fundamental to large-scale AI factories and high-throughput compute, liquid cooling dovetails nicely with Cisco’s hardware. Modern rack-scale systems, such as Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72, can exceed 200 kilowatts per rack – the company said its Cisco N9000 Series Switches are liquid-cooled and interoperate with Supermicro rack-scale, liquid-cooled compute to deliver rack-to-fabric speeds at AI factory throughput.
As the race to bring trillion-parameter training and high-throughput inference use cases to the enterprise burns bright, heat exchange will remain a major data center bottleneck. Platforms including the aforementioned NVL72 and Nvidia HGX Rubin NVL8 will continue to work at the front lines, requiring combined cooling systems alongside networking.
“With Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia, we no longer have to choose between performance, reliability or ease of management,” said James Manning, co-founder and Chief Executive of Sharon AI. “NCP validation gives us the confidence that our infrastructure is optimized from day one.”
By combining effort between Cisco and Supermicro, the partnership offers solutions for compute and networking infrastructure that are pressure-tested for service-ready enterprise environments. The company added that, once delivered, new Cisco Validated Services will help customers certify infrastructure to make certain it is built, designed, and aligned to reference architecture.
This way, datacenter compute, networking, security and resilience retain the standards and best practices outlined in deployment guidelines.
During operations, Nvidia AI Enterprise software and AgentOps delivered through the Cisco Cloud Control backend will allow customers to use their own tooling and utilities. The company said it expects this will allow most customers to enjoy using the hardware and software delivered by an AI Factory as if it were a robust expansion, instead of a complete overhaul.
“The AI Factory is a new concept – generating tokens and generating revenue. But that AI Factory needs to sit within your existing enterprise infrastructure,” Mark Hamilton, Nvidia’s vice president of solution architecture and engineering, said in an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “The lifeblood of AI is data. When you go use ChatGPT or Gemini, those are great models, but they are trained on public data. Cisco networking has access to enterprise data that is not accessible on the internet.”
Hamilton added that it’s more than just a rack-scale solution, providing factory-wide access for graphics processing units to vast amounts of data. That connectivity could open compute and networking for hundreds of thousands of GPUs at scale to handle the traffic volume for the AI inference needed in the agentic AI era.
The Supermicro compute solutions will roll out as part of the Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia beginning October this year.
Here’s the complete video of theCUBE’s deep dive on Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia: