Cisco unveiled innovations to simplify, secure, and future-proof data centers, empowering organizations to scale their AI ambitions with confidence.
Cisco's latest innovations enable enterprises and service providers to continue to accelerate the transformation of their infrastructure for the AI era. These innovations underscore Cisco's unique position as a trusted partner for hyperscale builders, neocloud providers, enterprises, and service providers, enabling the entire ecosystem to evolve and meet the demands of AI-driven workloads.
"The world is moving from chatbots intelligently answering our questions to agents conducting tasks and jobs fully autonomously. This is the agentic era of AI," said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. "As billions of AI agents begin working on our behalf, the demand for high-bandwidth, low latency and power efficient networking for data centers will soar. Cisco is at the forefront, delivering advanced, secure networking technology that's foundational to the AI-ready data centers of the future."
Cisco provides enterprise customers with new solutions to modernize their data centers, including hardware innovation and more powerful, simplified management capabilities. Cisco is also continuing to build on its relationship with NVIDIA to deliver validated infrastructure solutions, and to provide a safe and secure foundation for AI agents built with open models.
New innovations include:
- New Unified Fabric Experience with Nexus: Customers will be able to simplify network operations and enhance operational efficiency across environments, converging ACI and NX-OS VXLAN EVPN fabrics with unified data, control, policy enforcement, and management. The Unified Nexus Dashboard consolidates services across LAN, SAN, IPFM, and AI/ML fabrics into a single pane of glass. These capabilities will be available in the next Nexus Dashboard release in July 2025.
- Maximize AI Networking Performance: Customers can optimize AI workload operations with Cisco Intelligent Packet Flow. Available today, it dynamically steers traffic using real-time telemetry and congestion awareness across AI fabrics. With "end-to-end" visibility across networks, GPUs, and distributed AI jobs, more issues are detected proactively. Additionally, Cisco and NVIDIA showed progress towards a unified architecture; at Cisco Live, the companies showcased the first technical integration of Cisco G200-based switches and NVIDIA NICs, demonstrating NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking based on Cisco Silicon One that supports NX-OS, Nexus Hyperfabric AI and SONiC deployments.
- Expanded AI PODs: New configurable AI PODs enhance flexibility and scalability for diverse AI workloads, including training and fine-tuning. Cisco also continues to align with NVIDIA's innovation timeline; the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPU is now available to order with Cisco UCS C845A M8 servers. Together, the companies continue to work towards delivering validated solutions as part of the Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA.
- Enabling Safe, Secure AI Adoption with NVIDIA: Cisco AI Defense and Cisco Hypershield provide visibility, validation and runtime protection of the end-to-end enterprise AI workflow, and are now included in the NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design. With AI Defense, enterprises can secure AI agents built with leading open models and optimized with NVIDIA NIM and NeMo microservices.
- Optics for Simple Upgrades: New 400G bidirectional (BiDi) optics enables customers to easily transition to 400G networks while preserving their existing duplex multi-mode fiber infrastructure ensuring cost efficiency, scalability and enhanced data center performance. The new optics will be available in the second half of the calendar year 2025.
Cisco's Agile Services Networking architecture is designed not just to handle the increase and change in network traffic characteristics of AI, but also to fundamentally shift service providers' network architectures so they can support and monetize new kinds of services.
New innovations include:
- New Devices: New converged access and edge router devices, powered by Cisco Silicon One. These devices expand the Cisco 8000 series portfolio, which has allowed service providers to reach new levels of network efficiency and functionality.
- Agentic AI For Service Providers: A new multi-agentic framework for Cisco Crosswork Network Automation with AI capabilities to help accelerate operations and decision-making. This framework allows service providers to solve their most complex challenges through Cisco-built and customer-built AI agents, all working together towards a vision of autonomous networking.
- Non-terrestrial (satellite) Networking: Seamless integration between terrestrial and satellite networks. This architecture supports robust service assurance, dynamic resource allocation, and new monetization opportunities in remote, underserved sectors like maritime, aviation, IoT, and disaster response.
The Latest
Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...
Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...
Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...
Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...
As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...
Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ...
Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...
Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...
64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...