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.