Cisco and Red Hat solutions

Cisco and Red Hat are helping enterprises build and scale AI through an AI Factory approach by enabling organizations to develop intelligent agents at the core and deploy them seamlessly across edge environments.  

Together, Cisco’s secure, high-performance infrastructure and Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud platforms provide a consistent foundation to move AI from experimentation to production. Build once, deploy anywhere, and operationalize AI where data is created and decisions are made. 

Enable high-impact enterprise AI use cases: 

• Model-as-a-Service (MaaS): deliver reusable, scalable AI models across teams and applications 
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG): ground generative AI in enterprise data for more accurate, contextual outputs 
• Contextual search and intelligent agents: power real-time insights, automation, and decision-making across distributed environments 

As these capabilities become core to the enterprise, organizations must modernize the platforms that support them. 

Built on modern, enterprise-ready foundations: 

• Platform consistency: containerized, Kubernetes-based environments from core to edge  
• Hybrid-cloud flexibility: deploy and manage workloads across on-premises, cloud, and edge  
• Data-ready infrastructure: support high-performance data pipelines for AI and analytics  
• Automation & observability: simplify operations and maintain control at scale  
• Validated architectures: reduce risk with pre-tested, production-ready designs  

Cisco and Red Hat deliver a unified, validated platform to help organizations accelerate AI adoption—turning models into agents, and agents into real-world outcomes. 

Run AI workloads with confidence 

Moving from AI experimentation to production requires more than a working model. It demands a platform that unifies infrastructure management, network security, and full-stack observability. Cisco and Red Hat deliver a co-engineered foundation built to scale enterprise AI with confidence. 

A complete AI factory, built in 

Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA now includes support for Red Hat AI Factory Software, a unified AI software platform combining NVIDIA AI Enterprise and Red Hat AI Enterprise that gives AI practitioners everything they need to go from model to production: 

• Inference: llm-d, vLLM, Dynamo, and Triton/TRT-llm for flexible, high-performance model serving 
• Agents: OpenAI API / LlamaStack API compatibility, MCP registry, and eval and safety tooling 
• Data: data + AI pipelines, distributed training, model customization, and the Nemo Framework 
• Built-in observability: metrics, tracing, logging, alerting, and accelerator profiles across the stack 

This software runs on Cisco AI PODs, pre-validated clusters built on Cisco UCS compute and Nexus networking, so AI teams can skip setup and move straight to fine-tuning and inference. 

Manage, observe, and secure the full stack 

Cisco Intersight integrates with Red Hat OpenShift to provide a single management plane across hybrid environments from data center to edge. Splunk Observability Cloud collects telemetry directly from OpenShift, delivering unified visibility into GPU utilization, model quality, and application health. At the network layer, Cisco Isovalent enforces zero-trust, eBPF-based runtime security for containerized workloads on Kubernetes with no performance penalty. And Cisco AI Defense protects AI models from prompt injection, data exfiltration, and harmful outputs at runtime. 

Request a free trial of Red Hat OpenShift today or ask your Cisco representative about deploying Red Hat OpenShift within Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA. 

Bring AI inference to the edge 

Real-time AI decisions can't wait for a round trip to the data center. Whether it's a factory floor predicting equipment failures, a retail store personalizing customer experiences, a bank branch processing transactions, or a clinic supporting remote diagnostics, the intelligence needs to live where the work happens. 

Cisco and Red Hat make that possible with Red Hat AI Inference Server on Cisco Unified Edge: a purpose-built, modular platform that brings containerized AI workloads to distributed environments with the same reliability and security you expect from your core infrastructure. 

Right-sized for every edge deployment 

Not every edge site looks the same, and your infrastructure shouldn't force a one-size-fits-all approach. Cisco Unified Edge and Red Hat support flexible deployment tiers to match your workload requirements: 

• Medium to large edge sites: multiple Red Hat AI Inference Server instances running on Red Hat OpenShift, deployed across Cisco Unified Edge nodes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS and GPU servers. Ideal for public or multi-tenant deployments with distributed inference clusters. 
• Small to medium edge sites: a single Red Hat AI Inference Server on Red Hat Single Node OpenShift (SNO), providing enterprise-grade Kubernetes orchestration without the footprint. Suited for workloads like customer recommendation engines and virtual assistants. 
• Small edge sites: Red Hat AI Inference Server running directly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat Podman on Cisco Unified Edge. A lightweight, efficient option for low-concurrency workloads like clinical assistants summarizing patient notes. 

Optimized for fast, cost-effective inference 

Across all deployment sizes, Red Hat AI Inference Server delivers performance where it counts, with a vLLM runtime for high-throughput model serving, an LLM compressor to reduce compute overhead, and access to a pre-optimized model repository so teams can deploy quickly without starting from scratch. 

Cisco and Red Hat together enable you to: 

• Deploy AI at the edge at any scale, from a single GPU server to distributed multi-node clusters, with flexible architecture options 
• Simplify operations across thousands of sites with zero-touch provisioning through Cisco Intersight and automated management through Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 
• Maintain consistent security from core to edge with Cisco AI Defense and Isovalent zero-trust enforcement 
• Support any edge workload: containerized AI, traditional Linux applications, and KVM-based VMs on a single, unified platform 

Red Hat also provides Red Hat OpenShift AI, an integrated platform for building, training, tuning, deploying, and monitoring AI-enabled applications—plus predictive and foundation models—securely and at scale across hybrid-cloud environments. Red Hat OpenShift AI can be purchased directly from Cisco and can be deployed on Cisco Unified Edge.To provide enterprises with validated, production-ready infrastructure solutions for MLOps using Red Hat OpenShift AI, Cisco offers comprehensive designs. These include FlashStack for AI: MLOps using Red Hat OpenShift AI (which leverages FlashStack Virtual Server Infrastructure) and FlexPod Datacenter with Red Hat OpenShift AI for MLOps, built on FlexPod bare-metal infrastructure. Also see the Cisco AI POD for Enterprise Training and Fine-Tuning Design Guide. These solutions are designed to accelerate AI/ML efforts and streamline model delivery at scale. 

Explore our resources below or ask your Cisco representative about deploying Red Hat AI Inference Server on Cisco Unified Edge. 

Securely deploy applications faster—anywhere

Deploy and manage containerized applications at scale with solutions from Cisco and Red Hat

80% of IT leaders state all or most new applications will be built on cloud-native platforms over the next five years.* 

Deploying and managing containerized applications at scale is what Red Hat OpenShift is all about. This leading cloud-native container platform is used by more than 90% of the Fortune 500 to run containers on bare metal with Cisco UCS. 

Customers choose Red Hat OpenShift for its leadership in the Kubernetes market, support for fully managed cloud services, and consistency across all public cloud, data center, and edge environments. Customers choose Cisco UCS for its flexibility, performance, and operational simplicity. 

The benefits of running containers on bare metal from Red Hat and Cisco include:  

• Scalability and performance 
• Simplified management 
• Enhanced security 
• Optimized resource utilization  
• Flexibility and integration 
• Reliability and availability 
• Cost efficiency 

Try Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform or purchase it directly from Cisco to simplify your journey to application modernization. Ask your Cisco account manager for details. 

*Source: Techzine, June 2024

Reassess your virtualization strategy

Consolidate your containers and virtualization on a single platform

If changing market dynamics have caused you to rethink your virtualization strategy, Cisco and Red Hat have a proposal for you. 

Traditional virtualization platforms present challenges, including increasing costs, slow evolution, difficulties supporting growth and financial risk, and obstacles to developer productivity.  

Modern platforms, like Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, offer a way to reduce operational infrastructure costs, innovate at speed, and provide greater scalability, more security, and integrated development tools. 

Included with OpenShift, OpenShift Virtualization enables you to move, refactor, and modernize applications currently based on virtual machines into a cloud-native environment that can support both containers and virtual machines.  

OpenShift Virtualization also allows you to: 

• Accelerate application delivery with a single platform that manages applications using the same tools and teams  
• Maintain traditional virtual machine behavior in a modern Kubernetes platform (e.g., live migration) 
• Keep existing roles and responsibilities intact, allowing modernization of skill sets over time  
• Simplify migration of virtual machines at scale with the Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV)

Explore our resources below to learn more. Start a free trial today or ask your Cisco representative about purchasing Red Hat OpenShift with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. 

Automate infrastructure for efficiency and agility

Streamline operations from Day 0 to Day 2 and beyond

Today, organizations need to manage IT infrastructure with speed, consistency, and reduced manual effort. Automation is critical for ensuring continuous compliance, improving security, scaling resources dynamically, and accelerating application delivery across hybrid environments.

Cisco and Red Hat deliver a powerful, integrated automation solution built on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Cisco Intersight. This collaboration provides a single, trusted approach to orchestrate critical workflows, unify teams, and support diverse automation use cases across data center and edge environments.

The benefits of automating with Red Hat and Cisco include:

• Comprehensive lifecycle automation: Includes day-0 deployments, day-1 configurations, and day-2 operations and scalability for Cisco UCS, OpenShift, OpenShift Virtualization, and AI infrastructure. Also includes firmware upgrades, port configuration, infrastructure expansion, and network automation.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Leverage Ansible playbooks to treat infrastructure configurations like software code, enabling version control, automated testing, and CI/CD practices for greater reliability and consistency.
• Unified management with Cisco Intersight: Our cloud-based management platform, Cisco Intersight, integrates seamlessly with Ansible Automation Platform. It provides a single dashboard and robust API to automate policy-driven provisioning, manage configurations, and ensure operational visibility across your entire Cisco infrastructure.
• Accelerated AI and application modernization: You can establish a solid foundation for AI implementations and containerized applications by simplifying the deployment, management, and lifecycle of AI models and OpenShift clusters.
• Reduced risk and faster time-to-value: Use Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) and the rapidly growing Cisco Intersight–certified Content Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (which now includes more than 100 modules), Ansible Automation Platform Certified and Validated Content Collections to deploy pre-tested, standardized, and repeatable architectures, significantly reducing risk and accelerating time-to-value. 

Organizations using Cisco and Red Hat automation can achieve significant operational efficiencies like improved consistency, enhanced security posture, and greater business agility.

Explore our resources on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, including “Enhancing Day 2 Operations with Cisco Compute and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.” Start a free trial of Cisco Intersight today. Ask your Cisco account manager about purchasing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform directly from Cisco.

For performant and predictable deployments

Together, Cisco and Red Hat bring our technology to customers through Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), providing tested architectures for standardized, repeatable deployments. 

Our ready-to-go solutions include: 

• More than 20 CVDs with Red Hat technology 
• Faster time-to-market with lower risk 
• Strong total cost of ownership (TCO) and faster time-to-value 
• Cisco Success Tracks

See Red Hat CVDs, or view all CVDs.