Cisco Unified Edge At a Glance
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We’re at a critical inflection point. The edge has emerged as the place where the physical and digital worlds meet, demanding real-time processing and analysis of data to deliver informed decisions, improved experiences, and increased productivity. However, legacy infrastructure wasn’t built for the AI era and can’t keep up with the scale, speed, and intelligence required by AI-driven operations. While much of the model training happens in the data center, the shift of test-time inference to the edge makes it the new frontier for enterprise AI.
Deploying AI at the edge remains complicated and demanding. Issues like interoperability, security, cost, and rigid deployment models are all potential performance and productivity blockers. The increasing demand for AI and digitization at the edge necessitates a full system rethink. The ever-changing needs of businesses, combined with the vast scale of highly distributed edge environments and modern AI workloads, introduce a level of complexity that surpasses human capability to manage. We need something more than just more boxes; we need a brand-new edge infrastructure and operations vision.
Cisco Unified Edge, powered by Intel® Xeon® 6 SoC processors, is an AI-ready system that redefines computing at the edge by converging compute, networking, storage, and security. Designed from the edge up, for the next decade, the modular design is future-ready, energy-efficient, and easy-to-service and can be tailored to support today’s workloads and use cases while remaining adaptable to the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Seamless integration with third-party technologies and validated solutions for industry-specific needs help to ensure both compatibility and optimized performance.
Delivering breakthrough operational simplicity at scale, this software-defined system features centralized cloud management, zero-touch deployment, curated blueprints, and automated orchestration. These capabilities enable high scalability with minimal complexity. End-to-end observability with real-time analytics accelerates error detection and correction, helping minimize service outages. Security is designed-in, with integrated physical and digital safeguards to protect applications and data at the edge while multi-layered security capabilities protect infrastructure, applications, and AI models.
By combining compute, networking, security, and storage into a full stack, AI-ready system, Cisco Unified Edge introduces a fundamentally different infrastructure and operational paradigm for the enterprise edge. Unlike other solutions that may lack critical capabilities or are not optimized for edge use cases, this system offers fully validated solutions that deliver AI-era performance, security, and simplicity.
Cisco Unified Edge
● AI-ready edge: Adaptable to meet today and tomorrow's edge workload demands with ease, stopping the rip-and-replace cycle with a fully integrated, modular edge environment built for the next decade. Deploy applications and infrastructure faster and profit sooner with proven solutions that are tested and certified for vertical-specific workloads and use cases, ensuring compatibility and performance.
● Unified operation – edge to core: Onboard quickly and with ease without the need for highly skilled IT expertise or on-site visits. Whether deploying ten systems or ten thousand, zero-touch provisioning, curated blueprints and automation help to ensure consistent, effortless rollout. A consistent operating model from core to edge makes it easy to scale, upgrade, and support your infrastructure.
● Designed-in security: Prevent tampering at the edge with robust physical and digital protection. Proven policy-based templates eliminate configuration drift across sites. Embedded, zero-trust security capabilities aid in ensuring unmatched protection for your edge infrastructure, data, and AI models.
● Cisco UCS® XE9305 Chassis
◦ Three-Rack-Unit (3RU), short-depth (18") form factor with multiple mounting options
◦ Five front-facing slots for hot-swappable sled-based compute and networking nodes
◦ Two Cisco Unified Edge Management Controllers with embedded 25G switches
◦ Five hot swappable fan modules, acoustically optimized
Choice of:
● Cisco UCS XE130c M8 Compute Node (1 RU)
◦ One Intel Xeon 6 SoC processor with built-in CPU-native inferencing - 12/20/32-core options
◦ Up to 768GB of total memory
◦ Two 25G midplane connected NICs, and two 1/10G front panel network ports
◦ One GPU slot for a HH/HL 75W GPU
◦ RAID protected dual M.2 SATA SSDs for boot
◦ Up to four E3.S form factor NVMe SSDs (up to 120TB total storage)
◦ Up to one PCIe Gen5 slot for a NIC adapter or accelerator (DPU, IPU)
● Cisco UCS XE150c M8 Compute Node (2 RU)
◦ One Intel Xeon 6 SoC processor with built-in CPU-native inferencing - 20/32-core options
◦ Up to 1,024 GB of total memory
◦ Two 25G midplane connected NICs, and two 1/10G front-panel network ports
◦ Support for a FH/FL GPU, such as the NVIDIA RTX Pro 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, or L40S
◦ RAID protected dual M.2 SATA SSDs for boot
◦ Up to four E3.S form factor NVMe SSDs (up to 120TB total storage)
◦ Up to one PCIe Gen5 slot for a NIC adapter or accelerator (DPU, IPU)
● Cisco Intersight® Infrastructure Service
◦ SaaS-based infrastructure management
● The Intel Xeon 6 SoC incorporates advanced AI acceleration capabilities, including Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX), which significantly enhance inference performance and computational efficiency directly at the processor level.
● Cisco's Unified Edge platform leverages the Intel Xeon 6 SoC's integrated architecture to enable high-performance, low-latency AI processing at distributed edge locations.
● Intel OpenVINO™ toolkit provides hardware-optimized software acceleration specifically engineered for Intel architecture, ensuring AI models seamlessly utilize the Intel processor's built-in AI acceleration features for optimal performance and efficiency.
Get more information about Cisco Unified Edge and learn how it can future-proof and transform your edge environment at cisco.com/go/unifiededge.