Cisco Live: AI takes center stage

AI-native Digital Experience Assurance

On the management side, Cisco rolled out Digital Experience Assurance, which extends its ThousandEyes network intelligence platform across cloud environments – Amazon Web Services, for now – and now lets customers pinpoint problems and failures across on-premise resources they own and control, and resources they don’t own, such as those running on a cloud service. Cisco says there are tens of thousands of ThousandEyes agents spread across the internet and enterprise networks, and the platform is powered by more than 650 billion daily measurements globally.

The company also extended its AI-powered cloud insights program. Once customer workloads enter a cloud provider’s network, the platform can show how the components and services connect from a network perspective, how the application load balancers connect to the network load balancers, and how that ultimately forms a target group across multiple AWS EC2 instances, said Joe Vaccaro, vice president and general manager of Cisco ThousandEyes.

AI-driven intelligence in the ThousandEyes package can correlate patterns and unique combinations to triangulate the source of a problem and surface which incidents require attention and which do not, Vaccaro said. “ThousandEyes Event Detection is already providing this critical capability, reducing to mere minutes what could ordinarily take hours and multiple engineers to achieve.”

The company also extended ThousandEyes Endpoint Experience to gather details from Meraki Wi-Fi and LAN telemetry and device information, enabling customers to gain deeper insight into local network issues affecting users, Vaccaro said.

Hypershield support for AMD Pensando DPUs and Intel IPUs

For security, Cisco added support for AMD Pensando DPUs to its new AI-based HyperShield, a self-upgrading security fabric that’s designed to protect distributed applications, devices and data. Pensando DPUs include intelligent, programmable software to support software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage, and security services. 

Cisco said the DPUs would be available inside Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers and from other leading server vendors by the end of 2024. Cisco said it would support Intel’s programmable infrastructure processing units (IPU) as well.