SAN DIEGO – Cisco has upgraded critical components of its network family – including switches, routers and software for data center, campus, branch and IoT – in a major effort to deliver the growing capacity and management capabilities its enterprise customers will need for AI environments.
At the Cisco Live event going on this week, the vendor launched new Nexus data center management software, campus Smart Switches and branch routers, all of which offer AI-driven support or target AI workloads.
“There’s this AI explosion happening right now, where AI is growing and diversifying much more rapidly than anyone can keep up with,” said Craig Connors, vice president and CTO of Cisco’s Security Business Group. “One of the unique value props that Cisco is able to deliver by being a silicon provider, a compute provider, an optics provider, a networking expert, a security expert, is that we’re giving customers not just the infrastructure they need but infrastructure that’s modular, that’s extensible, that’s able to pivot if AI use cases and AI workload requirements change.”
Nexus dashboard
Aiming to address some of these demands in the data center, Cisco in July will begin offering a Unified Nexus Dashboard that will let customers see and manage Application Centric Infrastructure and Nexus NX-OS VXLAN EVPN fabrics with unified data, control, and policy enforcement. The dashboard will allow customers to consolidate and be able to control AI, LAN, SAN, and Cisco IP Fabric for Media (IPFM) systems from a single pane of glass. A new AI Assistant in Nexus Dashboard will help customers spot and fix problems quickly with natural language commands and intelligent remediation recommendations.
“Until now, total fabric management has been a concept, but now this is the real thing – a central dashboard for monitoring the health of all the networks fused together,” said Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer. “So, setting policy and monitoring the occurrence of what’s happening on the network are all looked [at] on a single plane.”
400G optical module
Cisco also targeted the speed of data center backbones by adding a 400G optical module for its data center switches.
“We have a number of … enterprise data center customers that have been using bi-directional optics for many generations, and this is the next generation of that feature,” said Bill Gartner, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s optical systems and optics business. “The 400G lets customer use their existing fiber infrastructure and reduces fiber count for them so they can use one fiber instead of two, for example,” Gartner said.
“What’s really changed in the last year or so is that with AI buildouts, there’s much, much more optics that are part of 400G and 800G, too. For AI infrastructure, the 400G and 800G optics are really the dominant optics going forward,” Gartner said.
New AI Pods
Taking aim at next-generation interconnected compute infrastructures, Cisco expanded its AI Pod offering with the Nvidia RTX 6000 Pro and Cisco UCS C845A M8 server package.
Cisco AI Pods are preconfigured, validated, and optimized infrastructure packages that customers can plug into their data center or edge environments as needed. The Pods include Nvidia AI Enterprise, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI, and are managed through Cisco Intersight. 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.
Building out the kind of full-scale AI infrastructure compute systems that hyperscalers and enterprises will utilize is a huge opportunity for Cisco, said Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group. “These are full-scale, full-stack systems that could land in a variety of enterprise and enterprise service application scenarios, which will be a big story for Cisco,” Newman said.
Campus networking
For the campus, Cisco has added two new programable SiliconOne-based Smart Switches: the C9350 Fixed Access Smart Switches and C9610 Modular Core. Both are built for AI workloads, such as agentic AI, generative AI, automation and AR/VR.
SiliconOne switch ASICs can run parallel operations in dedicated “slices” without interruption by other tasks, supporting more applications and allowing more complex applications to be run on the switch. The idea is to ensure the network core scales to meet the data gravity of AI traffic, according to Greg Dorai, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s switching business.
In addition to a 10-fold performance improvement over Cisco’s current 9350/9619 switches, the new boxes feature built-in security and real-time analytics to help IT detect anomalies, optimize traffic, and proactively troubleshoot without the need for extra sensors, Dorai stated.
The switches also include support for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to ensure campus-wide data confidentiality—even as encrypted data traverses increasingly complex, AI-driven topologies. This approach secures against interception by rogue devices or malicious edge endpoints, Dorai stated.
The switches block unauthorized endpoints and lateral movement within the switch, enforcing granular security and access policies using real-time endpoint context and removing the need to reroute traffic to distant firewalls for basic access control, Dorai stated.
Branch networking
Not leaving branch office networking out of the party, Cisco rolled out a family of five new routers. The Cisco Secure Routers family extends from the small branch office 8100 to the large, data center 8500 and ties together Cisco’s SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) offerings.
The 8000 Series Secure Routers include a new secure networking processor—which accelerates IPSec by 3x—and integrated Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) capabilities, including deep packet inspection, threat protection, and identity-based security policies, wrote Vikas Butaney, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Secure WAN and Industrial IoT group, in a blog post.
The routers deliver up to 95 Gbps for IPSec and up to 61Gbps for SD-WAN throughput, ensuring robust security and performance as the demand grows for higher WAN throughput, Butaney wrote.
At the higher end of the family, the 8400 Series Secure Routers are optimized for the campus edge, future-proofing 10Gbps to 25Gbps WAN transition with 3x more throughput with 40% less power consumption, Butaney wrote. The Cisco 8500 Series Secure Router is built for the data center to address high-scale WAN IP-Sec tunnel aggregation. Powering the Cisco 8500 Series is a Quantum Flow Processor (QFP) ASIC, according to Butaney.
Wi-Fi additions
Lastly, Cisco pumped up its enterprise Wi-Fi offerings with three new offerings:
- The CW9179F WiFi 7 access point, which is designed for large-scale device and bandwidth capacity deployments such as those found in stadiums, large public venues, and convention centers. The access point features a variety of new technologies, including a software switching feature that allows users to adjust coverage to areas that need it most, Cisco stated. It supports WPA3 encryption and integration with Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) for access control.
- The Cisco Campus Gateway for large Wi-Fi installations supports client roaming at scale – up to 1,000 roams per second – and can manage up to 5,000 access points and connect up to 50,000 clients in a single network, Cisco stated.
- A standalone Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul (URWB) package that uses advanced technologies such as redundant data paths and automatic failover to ensure that critical applications remain securely connected.