Cisco and Nvidia have expanded their partnership to create their most advanced AI architecture package to date, designed to promote secure enterprise AI networking.
The companies rolled out the Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia, which brings together Cisco security and networking technology, Nvidia DPUs, and storage options from Pure Storage, Hitachi, Vantara, NetApp, and VAST Data.
The Secure AI Factory, which the vendors announced at Nvidia’s GTC AI Conference going on this week in San Jose, Calif., integrates Cisco’s Hypershield and AI Defense packages to help protect the development, deployment, and use of AI models and applications, according to Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief product officer.
Hypershield uses AI to dynamically refine security policies based on application identity and behavior. It automates policy creation, optimization, and enforcement across workloads. In addition, Hypershield promises to let organizations autonomously segment their networks when threats are a problem, gain exploit protection without having to patch or revamp firewalls, and automatically upgrade software without interrupting computing resources.
AI Defense discovers the various models being used in a customer’s AI development and uses four features to help customers enforce AI protection: AI access, AI cloud visibility, AI model and application validation, and AI runtime protection. AI access offers visibility into who wants or has use of an AI application and then it controls access to protect and enforce data-loss prevention and mitigate potential threats. AI cloud visibility automatically uncovers AI assets comprising custom-built AI applications across your distributed environment, including unsanctioned AI workloads. This provides a single-pane-of-glass view of AI inventory, Cisco said.
“AI infrastructure is inherently complex, and securing it requires a new, holistic approach. That’s why our architecture embeds security at every layer of the AI stack,” Patel wrote in a blog post about the news. “With solutions like Cisco Isovalent, Cisco Secure Firewall, Cisco Hypershield and Cisco AI Defense, we automatically expand and adapt security measures as infrastructure changes, providing protection against evolving threats. This also includes the opportunity to integrate with NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs to improve security across the stack with real-time AI workload threat detection with NVIDIA DOCA AppShield.”
The Secure AI Factory will come in two forms depending on customer needs. The first option, based on Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric AI, will include:
- Cisco 6000 Series data center switches, cloud-managed by the CiscoNexus Hyperfabric AI controller.
- The Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) C885A M8, an 8U rack server built on Nvidia’s HGX platform and designed to deliver the accelerated compute capabilities needed for AI workloads such as large language model (LLM) training, model fine-tuning, large model inferencing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
- Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs and SuperNICs. SuperNICs are Nvidia’s new class of network accelerators designed to supercharge hyperscale AI workloads in Ethernet-based clouds. SuperNICs feature high-speed network connectivity for GPU-to-GPU communication, achieving speeds reaching 400Gb/s using remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology, according to Nvidia.
- Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI.
- VAST Data Storage support.
The second option includes:
- Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. These data center switches are a core component of the vendor’s enterprise AI offerings. They support congestion-management and flow-control algorithms and deliver the right latency and telemetry to meet the design requirements of AI/ML fabrics.
- Cisco UCS C885A M8 and C845A M8 servers.
- Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs and SuperNICs.
- Future Cisco switches will work with Nvidia’s Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform, managed by Nexus Dashboard.
- Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform.
- High-performance storage from Nvidia-certified partners Pure Storage, Hitachi, Vantara, NetApp, and VAST Data
- Open Source containerization and automation offerings from Red Hat to optimize AI and containerized workloads.
Cisco and Nvidia will also offer adaptable deployment models and reference architectures for customers to help with AI deployment.
“Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia helps enterprise customers to operationalize and secure a robust AI infrastructure for data engineering, AI training and model customization, AI pipeline security, AI inferencing, and compliance for AI models with use cases across industries including public sector, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and retail,” Patel wrote.
Packaged offerings based on the Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia architecture are expected to be available before the end of 2025. Many of the individual technology components such as the Cisco 9000 and 6000 or UCS M8 are available now.
The Secure AI Factory is just the latest in a string of Nvidia-based technologies co-developed and offered by the two companies.
For example, Cisco offers AI Pods, which are preconfigured, validated, and optimized infrastructure packages that customers can plug into their data center or edge environments as needed. The Pods are based on Cisco Validated Design principals, which offer customers pre-tested and validated network designs that provide a blueprint for building reliable, scalable, and secure network infrastructures, according to Cisco. The pods include Nvidia AI Enterprise, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI, and are managed through Cisco Intersight.
In addition, the vendors recently said Cisco will couple its Silicon One technology with Nvidia SuperNICs as part of its Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform, and Cisco will build systems that combine Nvidia Spectrum silicon with Cisco OS software.
Source:: Network World