Cisco, Nvidia target secure AI with expanded partnership

Cisco and Nvidia have expanded their partnership to offer integrated software and networking hardware that promises to help customers more easily spin up infrastructure to support AI applications.

The agreement deepens both companies’ strategy to expand the role of Ethernet networking for AI workloads in the enterprise. It also gives both companies access to each other’s sales and support systems.

“Cisco and Nvidia’s purpose-built Ethernet networking-based solutions will be sold through Cisco’s vast global channel, offering professional services and support through key partners who are committed to helping businesses deploy their GPU clusters via Ethernet infrastructure,” Cisco stated.

In terms of specific products, Nvidia’s newest Tensor Core GPUs will be available in Cisco’s current M7 Unified computing System (UCS) rack and blade servers, including Cisco UCS X-Series and UCS X-Series Direct, to support AI and data-intensive workloads in the data center and at the edge, the companies stated. The integrated package, which will be available in the second quarter, will include Nvidia AI Enterprise software, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI.

“Jointly validated reference architectures through Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) make it simple to deploy and manage AI clusters at any scale in a wide array of use cases spanning virtualized and containerized environments, with both converged and hyperconverged options. CVDs for FlexPod and FlashStack for Generative AI Inferencing with Nvidia AI Enterprise will be available this month, with more to follow,” Cisco stated.

The integrated package will also include ties to other Cisco software; for example, support for Cisco’s ThousandEyes Digital Experience Monitoring software can provide AI-driven insights and automated remediation of problems that occur between the cloud to on-premises networks, Cisco stated.

Nvidia has enabled many AI implementations that rely on InfiniBand networking. Now it’s also involved in industry efforts to ensure that Ethernet is the critical underpinning for AI networks in the future.

Most recently, Nvidia launched Spectrum-X, its latest generation of Ethernet networking technology, designed for data centers with heavy AI workloads. Spectrum-X is a combination of hardware and software, melding the Spectrum-4 Ethernet switch and BlueField-3 DPU together, which are designed to work in tandem to reduce traffic congestion and potentially eliminate packet loss.

Meanwhile, Cisco is one of the core vendors driving the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), a group that’s working to develop physical, link, transport and software layer advances for Ethernet to make it more capable of supporting AI infrastructures.

“Organizations are sitting on massive amounts of data that they are trying to make more accessible and gain value from faster, and they are looking at AI technology now,” Thomas Scheibe, vice president of product management with Cisco’s cloud networking, Nexus & ACI product line, told Network World recently. “Customers want to know what they need to do now on the networking side to be able to run the huge clusters of GPUs they need and handle the volumes of data they create. And for most customers, it’s going to be Ethernet,” Scheibe said