Nvidia and Cisco to Accelerate Data Centre AI Adoption
AI is a clear priority within the data centre industry, as increasing numbers of businesses are making changes to their hardware to support new workloads.
Bringing together two of the most utilised networking portfolios, Cisco Silicon One and NVIDIA Spectrum-X, both Cisco and Nvidia are hoping to offer enterprises greater flexibility and choice when it comes to AI data centre investments.
The cross-portfolio unified architecture aims to simplify building AI-ready data centre networks and give organisations more choice as they look to meet the demands of AI workloads for high-performance, low-latency and faster connectivity within and between data centres, clouds and users.
“Enterprises are under immense pressure to deploy AI quickly and effectively, and many leaders struggle to justify the investment while balancing the risks,” explains Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO at Cisco.
“Together, Cisco and Nvidia are partnering to remove barriers for customers and ensure they can optimise their infrastructure investments to unlock the power of AI.”
Building out AI
Whilst businesses are recognising that AI is essential to growth, many are still in the early stages of adoption given the technical complexity and security demands of operating AI-ready data centres.
In order to support companies in preparing for AI, Cisco will build systems combining Nvidia Spectrum reference architecture with Cisco operating system software. This should enable customers to simultaneously standardise Cisco networking and Nvidia technology within the data centre.
Both companies hope this proposed collaboration will open new market opportunities for Cisco by unifying the architectural model between front-end and back-end networks. This, Cisco says, should make it easier to manage enterprise and cloud provider networks.
“A robust and scalable AI ecosystem is key to driving the transformative power of AI,” says Hans Vestberg, Chairman and CEO of Verizon. “This expanded partnership between Cisco and Nvidia, just like our Verizon AI Connect strategy and solutions, builds towards accelerating and enabling resource-intensive AI workloads at the Edge of the network.”
How partnerships can accelerate innovation
The companies are eager to bring new levels of innovation to the data centre to accelerate AI adoption. Ultimately, the objective is to deliver the highest performance Ethernet solutions available for AI workloads, whilst also extending Nvidia’s Spectrum X architecture to include Cisco Silicon One.
This would make Cisco the only partner silicon supported in Spectrum-X Ethernet solutions, with the partnership expansion meaning that more enterprise data centre Ethernet AI projects could be fully developed, rather than being limited to just public cloud or SaaS services.
- Cisco will develop data centre switches with the NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet platform
- Cisco will collaborate with NVIDIA to create and validate NVIDIA Enterprise Reference Architectures (ERA) and NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) Reference Architectures based on NVIDIA Spectrum-X
- Cisco and NVIDIA are committed to collaboration and joint development, aiming to deliver the highest-performing Ethernet solutions for customers
Specifically, the NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform based on Cisco and Nvidia silicon will form the foundation for many enterprise AI workloads. By enabling interoperability between both companies’ networking architectures, the two companies are prioritising the customer’s need for simplified, full-stack solutions.
“Advancing at lightspeed, AI will revolutionise every industry,” says Jensen Huang, founder and CEO at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Spectrum-X is Ethernet enhanced and supercharged for AI.
“Together with Cisco’s enterprise platforms and global reach, we can help companies worldwide build state-of-the-art NVIDIA infrastructure as they race to transform with AI.”
Making it easier to integrate and standardise on both Cisco and Nvidia technology will ensure that customers benefit from current and future technology advancements, particularly as the data centre industry evolves to embrace emerging technologies further.
This includes advancements to the Spectrum-X platform, which includes adaptive routing, telemetry, congestion control and low latency, in addition to Cisco's broader networking, security and digital resilience portfolio.
As businesses develop AI capabilities and train models on their own data, both companies recognise that having a comprehensive security strategy is more critical.
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