The ask from the business:
Cisco IT set out to bolster employee productivity with its internal AI Assistant, but it needed more in-house infrastructure, and quickly.
Challenge
Cisco’s existing AI infrastructure took as long as six months to design, order and deploy. It was vital that we be able to do it more quickly, overcoming:
- Complex ecosystem: AI infrastructure forms a connected and complex landscape, which made it extremely difficult to design, build and scale.
- Delays that led to waste: Every delay in installation led to wasted hardware lifespan, time and money. The acceleration of AI innovation only exacerbated this waste.
- Limitations of network management solution: No one solution existed that could provide comprehensive data visibility through networking and compute, so engineers spent countless hours compiling data, manually planning and investigating issues.
- Talent and skill gap: Building AI networks requires deep knowledge of advanced networking technologies. Finding many engineers with this level of expertise was challenging.
Solution
The team became the first real-world user of Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric, using it to quickly order and deploy a full stack of Cisco Data Centre Networking solutions, including:
- Cisco 6000 Series Switches: Cloud-managed secure switches that deliver simplicity and high performance, built for Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric.
- Cisco UCS Servers: Bring together compute, networking and storage, all in a single system to power our AI applications.
- Cisco Silicon One: This architecture for our Cisco switches delivers unmatched routing and switching capabilities for AI and networking needs.
- Cisco Optics: Fast, reliable optical transceivers deliver resilience across our complex infrastructure.
Dramatically increased speed to deploy
Standing up the AI fabric took just six days with Nexus Hyperfabric, whereas previous builds took as long as six months. This dramatic acceleration maximised time-to-value on our infrastructure and allowed us to power our applications with urgency.
Simplicity in deployment and management
AI integration and full stack data visibility simplify the design, ordering, deployment and management processes. This makes it easier for engineers of any expertise level to build and manage AI networks.
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