Cisco is adding to its UCS AI compute portfolio with the new UCS C885A M8 servers which the company says are purpose-built for GPU-intensive AI workloads.
The servers include the NVIDIA HGX supercomputing platform with NVIDIA H100 and H200 Tensor Core GPUs.
This is Cisco's first entry into its dedicated AI server portfolio and its first eight-way accelerated computing system built on the NVIDIA HGX platform.
Each server includes NVIDIA NICs or SuperNICs to accelerate AI networking performance, as well as NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs to accelerate GPU access to data and enable robust, zero-trust security.
Cisco is also introducing AI PODs, plug-and-play infrastructure stacks tailored for specific AI use cases and industries.
The stacks combine compute, networking, storage, and cloud management, and Cisco says the pre-sized and configured bundles of infrastructure eliminate the guesswork from deploying AI inference solutions – from edge inferencing to large-scale clusters with NVIDIA accelerated computing.
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The plug-and-play solutions, powered by new 800G switches, include NVIDIA AI Enterprise, an end-to-end, cloud-native software platform that accelerates data science pipelines and streamlines AI development and deployment.
"Enterprise customers are under pressure to deploy AI workloads, especially as we move toward agentic workflows, and AI begins solving problems on its own," said Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer, Cisco.
"Cisco innovations like AI PODs and the GPU server strengthen the security, compliance, and processing power of those workloads as customers navigate their AI journeys from inferencing to training."
Neil Anderson, VP Cloud, Infrastructure, and AI Solutions, at IT services company World Wide Technology (WWT), said one of the challenges the company sees for customers is the complexity of the AI infrastructure stack.
"There are many options and the technology is moving very rapidly," Anderson said.
"Cisco's solutions like the AI PODs will simplify and accelerate AI adoption for our customers allowing them to focus on the AI outcomes they are seeking for their organisations.
"At WWT we are excited to work with Cisco to showcase the Cisco AI PODs in our AI Proving Ground Lab and accelerate the AI journey for our mutual customers."
