The Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia has been extended into the rack-scale era, offering enterprises greater full-stack operational capabilities as a result.

Designed to give customers a framework for deploying artificial intelligence across their entire infrastructure, Secure AI Factory with Nvidia from Cisco Systems Inc. now integrates rack-to-fabric liquid cooling supporting systems beyond 200 kilowatts per rack for reasoning, agentic AI and trillion-parameter training. The latest enhancements include Nvidia Spectrum-X switch silicon paired with a Cisco operating system, enabling customers to leverage both Nvidia Cloud Partner-compliant reference architectures and Cisco Silicon One-based architectures.

“From a networking standpoint, on the scale-out portion connecting GPUs, we have a stack from Cisco where we’re taking the Nvidia Spectrum silicon [and] we’re putting our NX-OS or SONiC on it,” said Will Eatherton (pictured, left), senior vice president and head of networking engineering at Cisco. “Then we use that to connect the GPUs on the front end. We use Cisco Silicon One with a similar, same software — NX-OS, SONiC — and then we have an option where, for instance, the customer is doing high-performance networking with storage.”

Eatherton spoke with John Furrier at the “Cisco Secure AI Factory With Nvidia Expands to Rack Scale” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Marc Hamilton (right), vice president of solutions architecture and engineering at Nvidia Corp., and they discussed how the two companies were addressing the deployment gap between acquiring GPUs and operating production-ready AI factories.

Rack-scale architecture for the AI factory

As AI moves from the research lab into manufacturing floors and shopping aisles, enterprises are looking for full-stack architecture that can implement autonomous technology across high-value production environments. This is a central feature of the AI factory, and Cisco, in partnership with Nvidia, is positioning its portfolio to supply the operational foundation that can drive this model.

“It’s much more than even a rack-scale solution, this is really an AI factory-wide solution,” Hamilton explained. “As you get into the GenAI world, you may have to call out to your agent sitting in a sandbox or doing some tool calling that is sitting on your front-end network. Now you’re running this and something slows down. Where on earth do you even know how to go in and look and debug this and optimize this across this stack? That really is the power of the reference architecture that Cisco is fully adopting and bringing to their customers.”

The application of this reference architecture has involved the integration of a number of Cisco’s previously developed tools and services. These include Cisco Nexus One, an open, unified networking management plane that integrates silicon, systems, software and operating models with embedded security and observability, and the Cisco Cloud Control operations platform for agentic IT.

“It’s a network OS layer from Cisco that we’re bringing in and then we do have a common management layer,” Eatherton told theCUBE. “We have our Nexus One, which is how we do our day-to-day operations and management and monitoring. Then we have Cisco Cloud Control which is where we bring in AgenticOps across the whole solution. We’re bringing in software, sales and support for this whole cluster. That’s really been key in the partnership with Nvidia because they’re looking for outcomes for customers that are parallel to the stack that they’ve put together with all the right technology components.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Cisco Secure AI Factory With Nvidia Expands to Rack Scale” event:

Image: SiliconANGLE