Cisco Doubles Down on AI with New Servers, 'AI PODs'

CISCO PARTNER SUMMIT — Cisco is padding its data center portfolio with solutions the company says will give businesses a more simplified route to adopting AI.

The company announced at its Cisco Partner Summit in Los Angeles what it calls its first dedicated AI server. It also unveiled plug-and-play AI infrastructure stacks − which it's calling AI PODs − geared toward specific verticals and use cases. Cisco executives say these new solutions address IT teams' gaps in AI readiness. Cisco's AI Readiness Index found that although 89% of IT professions want to implement AI workloads in the next two years, only 14% said their infrastructure is ready for it.

Cisco's Jeetu Patel

“Enterprise customers are under pressure to deploy AI workloads, especially as we move toward AI solving problems on its own,” Cisco chief product officer Jeetu Patel said. “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."

Rob Kim, chief technology officer at Presidio, the large Cisco channel partner, said businesses need "robust infrastructure" that can scale to support accelerated computing.

"We're excited about Cisco's efforts to make AI easier for our customers to stand up and manage. With these new solutions, Presidio is able to bring customers new solutions that fit within their existing infrastructure, are easy to deploy and manage, and provide the right infrastructure for their AI journeys," Kim said.

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New Cisco AI Solutions

AI PODs put together stacks of compute, network, storage and cloud for particular AI use cases. The infrastructure stacks use Cisco Validated Designs and come in preconfigured bundles. The Cisco AI PODs use the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform for AI development and deployment. The PODs will go live next month.

Channel Futures TV caught up with Cisco's Brad Feldman at this year's Channel Partners Conference & Expo.

Neil Anderson, vice president of cloud, infrastructure and AI solutions for World Wide Technology, another big Cisco partner, said customers are dealing with complexity in their AI infrastructure.

"There are many options and the technology is moving very rapidly. 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 organizations," Anderson said.

Cisco has also added UCS C885 M8 servers that reportedly tackle "GPU-intensive AI workloads." They use the Nvidia HGX supercomputing platform as well as Nvidia GPUs. Customers can now order the servers.

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Customers and partners can manage the solutions using the Cisco Intersight platform.