Technology giant Cisco recently announced new solutions for service providers, allowing them to deliver AI connectivity.
These new innovations will enable service providers to handle increased data volume and variety and monetize the services supporting AI traffic. Additionally, Cisco says these innovations showcase the evolution of Cisco Silicon One, with new devices enabling Cisco customers to build more flexible networks designed to deliver AI services.
Through Cisco’s Agile Services Networking architecture, the company offers service providers a path forward for AI connectivity that enables providers to monetize the delivery of assured services and networking.
“The AI revolution is a massive potential tailwind for service providers,” said Jeetu Patel, EVP and chief product officer at Cisco. “AI, and especially the advent of AI agents, will mean an incredible influx of new digital workers who will be working together and communicating constantly. Cisco’s Agile Services Networking is the blueprint for service providers as they look to capitalize on the opportunities of AI by meeting the demand for high-bandwidth, secure, and energy-efficient connectivity.”
Delivering new services to power AI
Cisco is introducing several new services to deliver the Cisco Agile Services Networking architecture. Together, these latest innovations will supply service providers with the tools necessary to evolve their networks, develop new service offerings, and monetize the delivery of assured services.
These new services include:
- Cisco Silicon One Systems and Platforms: New Silicon One and Cisco 8000 portfolio additions to access, edge, and metro networks offer consistent control, sustainability, security, and manageability for network building at the silicon and systems levels. Additionally, the architecture introduces the new Cisco Silicon One A100 and K100 devices for fixed, centralized, and modular systems.
- Cisco Coherent Pluggable Optics: Routed Optical Networking will be extended in new use cases for replacing transponders with coherent pluggable optics in metro edge/access for widely deployed 100G ports, new 800G ports, and ultra long-haul applications to connect locations up to 3000km apart with 400G coherent pluggable optics.
- Network automation and assurance features: Cisco Crosswork Network Automation and Provider Connectivity Assurance offer new predictive AI technology to accelerate network capacity planning and resource allocation and give operators comprehensive views on managing their entire network infrastructure. Further, Provider Connectivity Assurance will integrate with Splunk, allowing customers to correlate application and infrastructure performance data and drive automated decisions that accelerate resolution.
According to Cisco, these new innovations will offer service providers the tools necessary to evolve their networks, develop new service offerings, and monetize the delivery of assured services.
Agile Service Networking and Cisco’s circular product lifecycle programs provide a more energy-efficient and less resource-intensive architecture. These sustainability components are projected to help customers reduce CO2 emissions by 324 tons and power consumption by 80 percent when compared to traditional, centralized deployments, Cisco says.
Switches for scalable AI demand
Cisco is also introducing the Cisco Nexus 9300 Series Smart Switches with embedded data processing units (DPUs), reimagining AI data center design with intelligent traffic steering and a new class of silicon.
This new family of data center Smart Switches utilizes programmable AMD DPUs and functions as a high-capacity, multifunctional service-hosting device. They will architecturally transform data centers to simplify their design and make them more efficient. The company’s first combined offering, the Smart Switch with Cisco Hypershield, brings a new approach to securing AI data centers by fusing security directly into the network fabric.
As AI drives rapid growth, Cisco Nexus Smart Switches will offer an easy and efficient architecture by embedding services directly into the data center fabric rather than bolting them on top.
By combining Cisco data center networking, Silicon One, and AMD DPUs, customers can scale services and adapt quickly to evolving business needs without needing additional hardware.
These switches feature two processing engines: a high-performance network processor for stable data transfer and a network services sidecar for agile security processing. Traffic will move between these engines for optimal performance.
The first integrated service includes Cisco Nexus Smart Switches and Hypershield to form a new data center security approach that combines AI-native, hardware-accelerated, distributed security architecture directly within the data center fabric to:
- Provide security that’s melted into the data center network: Hypershield embedded in the switching layer reduces the number of appliances and allows data center operators to create a ‘micro perimeter’ around each service that makes up a workload.
- Enable autonomous segmentation policies: Customers can benefit from automatically updating security policies to the right enforcement points, ensuring consistent security with minimal manual effort.
- Keep security posture up-to-date without disruption: By self-qualifying policy updates before deployment, organizations can minimize risks and drive policy lifecycle management at scale.
- Easily extend consistent policy enforcement across multiple domains: The ability to manage policies consistently across a library of enforcement points in the cloud, on-prem, and on traditional next-gen firewalls, customers now have a single management system with Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall.
- Manage network and security workflows with persona-driven operations: The integrated solution will also support common and separate workflows for NetOps, SecOps, or NetSecOps teams using a single solution to maintain connectivity and security.
Cisco has been keeping AI at the top of the priority list. Read more about Cisco’s new AI solutions to accelerate adoption.