Cisco announced plans to expand its partnership with NVIDIA to provide AI technology solutions to enterprises. This collaboration is focused on providing organizations with the flexibility and variety necessary to manage AI workloads that demand high-performance, low-latency, and power-efficient connectivity across data centers, cloud environments, and end-users.
The partnership enables the seamless integration and standardization of Cisco and NVIDIA technologies to leverage advancements in the NVIDIA Spectrum-X platform.
The NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform is built on a foundation of both Cisco and NVIDIA silicon, which will underpin a range of enterprise AI workloads. By facilitating interoperability between their networking frameworks, the two companies are set to streamline the delivery of integrated, full-stack solutions. The overarching objective of this enhanced partnership is to empower customers to maximize the ROI on their AI infrastructure investments through a unified architecture while leveraging existing management tools and workflows across both front-end 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,” said 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.”
Also Read: Cisco Launches New Smart Switches for Data Center“Advancing at lightspeed, AI will revolutionize every industry,” said 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.”
Cisco and NVIDIA are planning to develop joint solutions for customers.
- Cisco will develop data center switches with the NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet platform. The open ecosystem approach will provide customers with more choices and flexibility. Organizations 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-X with 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.
Cisco plans to enhance its Silicon switches to be compatible with Spectrum-X and NVIDIA’s reference architectures. These updates will be available in the middle of calendar year 2025.
Cisco and NVIDIA: Accelerating AI workload adoption in the enterprise
Together, the two companies are committed to bringing new levels of innovation to accelerate the adoption of AI within enterprises. Focusing on simplifying deployment and operations, while improving workload performance and visibility, the objective of this deeper partnership is to deliver the highest performance Ethernet solutions available for AI workloads and extend NVIDIA’s Spectrum-X architecture to include Cisco Silicon One, making Cisco the only partner silicon supported in Spectrum-X Ethernet solutions. In addition, the expanded partnership will help move enterprise data center Ethernet AI projects from prototype to full deployment, which would otherwise be limited to public cloud or SaaS services.
(Source: Cisco)
