Cisco has announced plans for an expanded partnership with Nvidia to provide AI technology solutions to enterprises.
Enterprises recognize that AI is essential to growth but remain early in their adoption as they navigate the unique technical complexity and security demands of operating AI-ready data centres. The expanded partnership aims to give organisations flexibility and choice as they look to meet the demand of AI workloads for high-performance, low-latency, highly power-efficient connectivity within – and between – data centres, clouds, and users.
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 customers’ needs for simplified, full-stack solutions.
The goal of the expanded partnership is to allow customers to optimize their AI infrastructure investments with a common architecture, using their existing management tools and processes, spanning front and back-end networks.
“Enterprises are under immense pressure to deploy AI quickly and effectively, and many leaders struggle to justify the investment while balancing the risks,” says Chuck Robbins, chair and CEO of Cisco. “Together, Cisco and Nvidia are partnering to remove barriers for customers and ensure they can optimize their infrastructure investments to unlock the power of AI.”
“Advancing at lightspeed, AI will revolutionise every industry,” says Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of 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.”
By making it easier to integrate and standardize on both Cisco and Nvidia technology, customers will benefit from current and future technology advancements in the Nvidia Spectrum-X platform such as adaptive routing, telemetry, congestion control and low latency, as well as Cisco’s broader networking, security, and digital resilience portfolio, including the Splunk data platform. As businesses develop AI capabilities and train models on their own data, having a comprehensive security strategy becomes crucial.
Cisco and Nvidia are planning to develop joint solutions for customers.
- Cisco will develop data centre switches with the Nvidia Spectrum Ethernet platform.The open ecosystem approach will provide customers with more choices and flexibility. Organisations can standardize on the Nvidia Spectrum-X networking platform with both Cisco and Nvidia switch silicon-based architectures, bringing the industry-leading technologies from both companies under a single management fabric.
- Cisco will collaborate with Nvidia to create and validate NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) and Enterprise Reference Architectures based on Nvidia Spectrum-Xwith Cisco Silicon One, Hyperfabric, Nexus, UCS Compute, Optics, and other Cisco technologies.
- Cisco and Nvidia are committed to collaboration and joint development, aiming to deliver the highest-performing Ethernet solutions for customers.The companies plan for continued collaboration to address significant challenges like congestion management and load balancing so that customers can scale and secure AI deployments.