“Customers can now control and manage this environment and operate it like it was a traditional data center fabric,” Wollenweber said. “The ability to bring it under the same Nexus umbrella is actually a huge selling point for AI customers, because their IT infrastructure folks, their operational people that are running the network, already understand how to use these Nexus tools, and so they can now add AI workloads and kind of accelerated computing technologies like GPUs, but in that same Nexus umbrella,” Wollenweber said.
“As Al becomes operational and distributed, complexity becomes the enemy of scale. Fragmented architectures force customers to manage integration, policy enforcement, observability, and security across silos, increasing cost and slowing innovation,” said Wollenweber. “Architecting silicon, networking, compute, security, and Al software into a cohesive system gives organizations a unified operating model, stronger performance guarantees, and embedded trust.”
Those are the driving ideas around Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia, Wollenweber said.
Introduced a year ago, Secure AI Factory with Nvidia integrates Cisco’s Hypershield and AI Defense packages to help protect the development, deployment, and use of AI models and applications. Hypershield uses AI to dynamically refine security policies based on application identity and behavior. It automates policy creation, optimization, and enforcement across workloads. AI Defense discovers the various models being used in a customer’s AI development and uses four features to help customers enforce AI protection: AI access, AI cloud visibility, AI model and application validation, and AI runtime protection.
Cisco integrates Hybrid Mesh Firewall technology
On the security side, Cisco said it will embed its Hybrid Mesh Firewall technology to allow for security policy enforcement on Nvidia BlueField data processing units (DPU) that are embedded in Nvidia GPU servers connected to Cisco Nexus One fabrics. Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall offers a distributed security fabric that features a zero-trust security framework integrated into the network for segmentation, AI application protection and advanced threat protection, Cisco stated.
The idea is to block threats at the server level before they ever reach an organization’s data, Wollenweber said. Customers can protect AI workloads by microsegmenting those systems as well as offer application-level security.
