Cisco will invest $1 billion in AI and package a new networking solution with NVIDIA's AI infrastructure, the organization announced at its annual consumer event on June 4. Cisco Live will take place in Las Vegas from June 2-6. These and other Cisco Live announcements address enterprise AI trends, plus increased visibility and security.
Cisco Partners with NVIDIA on Nexus HyperFabric AI Clusters
A new networking solution from Cisco and NVIDIA called Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI clusters is the companies' attempt to create a seamless on-ramp to AI for customers who may not have deep AI implementation knowledge or skills. of you. Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI clusters can be used to deploy, manage, and monitor generative AI infrastructure for an enterprise.
“While the promise of AI is clear, the path forward for many just starting out is not. Customers often face economic and operational challenges in getting an AI stack up and running,” Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco Networking, said in a press release. “Cisco is committed to simplifying the deployment and operation of AI infrastructure.”
SEE: UALink Promoter Group seeks to create a standard for AI infrastructure, notably without NVIDIA.
The idea is that organizations need guidance in implementing AI infrastructure. Therefore, the Nexus HyperFabric AI cluster solution combines Cisco Ethernet switching and cloud-managed options with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, NVIDIA NIM inference microservices, NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs, VAST data platform, and more.
General availability is expected in Q4 2024, with select customers gaining access in early Q4.
To make it even easier for IT teams to execute generative AI, Cisco offers AI infrastructure training. The CCDE AI Infrastructure certification can be obtained through Cisco Learning and Certifications.
Just the beginning of AI investing: Cisco launches global fund
Cisco is investing $1 billion in AI through its global investment fund, which is a commitment to support AI startups and generative solutions. Cohere, Mistral AI and Scale AI will receive funding from Cisco as strategic partners. Cisco has committed $200 million to this fund so far.
Cisco announces security improvements for the cloud, web applications and more
Cisco announced improvements to existing security products:
- The Firewall 1200 Series, which no longer requires enterprise branch offices to have multiple devices for their switches, routers and firewalls, will be available in October 2024.
- Security Cloud Control, a management architecture for Cisco Security Cloud, providing an overview of AI for Cisco Secure Firewall, Secure Firewall Threat Defense, Secure Firewall ASA, Multicloud Defense and Hypershield, available in September.
- Technical add-ons for Splunk, which Cisco acquired in March, including new Cisco telemetry sources within Splunk for the security operations center. These will be implemented in the coming months.
- Firewall Threat Defense version 7.6 for all Cisco firewalls.
- Google Chrome Enterprise data and threat protection for all web applications protected by Cisco Secure Access.
Cisco Hypershield support added to AMD Pensado DPUs and Intel infrastructure
Cisco Hypershield, a security architecture that the company introduced in April 2024 that extends security enforcement across virtual machines or Kubernetes clusters, is coming to some new services. AMD Pensando DPUs will support Cisco Hypershield in late 2024, specifically starting with Cisco Unified Computing System servers. Support for Hypershield on AMD Pensando DPUs will expand to other Intel server and infrastructure processing unit vendors by the end of the year.
“By leveraging our DPUs on customer servers or future Cisco networking platforms, Hypershield users can enjoy high-capacity performance and intelligent policy enforcement without compromising workload performance,” wrote Soni Jiandani, general manager of AMD's Network Technology and Solutions Group. in a press release.
ThousandEyes visibility engine comes to Digital Experience Assurance
ThousandEyes is a visibility engine for device management that Cisco acquired in 2020. Now, Cisco has added ThousandEyes AI alerts to Digital Experience Assurance for Cisco Networking Cloud. ThousandEyes draws on the entire Cisco ecosystem to provide proactive suggestions, sending telemetry and device data to customers' domain controllers and management systems.
ThousandEyes can now map AWS environments, display a unified view of external and internal network conditions across Cisco and non-Cisco networking platforms in Traffic Insights, and receive telemetry and device information from Wi-Fi and local area network by Meraki. ThousandEyes further partnered with Meraki to improve the Meraki Assurance overview.
TechRepublic covers Cisco Live remotely.
