Cisco has been onerous at work revitalizing its information heart switching portfolio, introducing thrilling new developments throughout the Nexus 9000 (N9000) line. A key aspect of this evolution is the open, built-in, and extensible Cisco Nexus One, which helps a number of silicon choices—together with Cisco Silicon One and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet swap silicon—throughout N9000 switches and optics, all whereas delivering a constant operational expertise.
The unified working mannequin seamlessly connects underlay, overlay, and Kubernetes environments to supply safe, end-to-end networking for all workloads—consolidated inside Nexus One.
As information heart deployments scale and develop extra advanced, together with giant AI-scale deployments, use instances and deployment fashions for switching are evolving and adapting to those rising necessities, together with AI coaching and inference.
The objective of Nexus One is to supply a constant material expertise and outcomes throughout Nexus information heart materials, together with Cisco NX-OS and Cisco ACI, managed from Cisco Nexus Dashboard, to ship networking automation, assurance, visibility, and analytics whatever the particular working system and particular reference structure getting used. Nexus One additionally lays the muse for seamlessly integrating Cisco Hyperfabric, Cisco’s newest cloud-managed information heart material, and increasing to the cloud-native environments.
Adapting to hybrid environments
As we lined in our weblog on the Cisco N9000 for front-end and back-end networks, a various buyer base throughout enterprises and clouds is demanding versatile networking options that may adapt to many alternative wants.
To satisfy this finish, N9000 features a versatile structure to undertake totally different types of silicon and methods, together with Cisco Silicon One in addition to NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet swap silicon. N9000 methods ship working system selection and adaptability, with help for Cisco NX-OS, ACI, and open-source SONiC.
When paired with Cisco Nexus Dashboard, one can simply provision, configure, and function all from a single pane of glass, delivering a unified working mannequin. This guarantees flexibility, operational effectivity, and efficiency.
However there’s much more to it—Nexus One’s strategy delivers unification, not simply on the administration aircraft by way of Nexus Dashboard, but additionally on the information aircraft, management aircraft, and coverage planes. By driving and leveraging an RFC standards-based strategy, Nexus One delivers ACI improvements on high of VXLAN EVPN materials, fostering larger openness and interoperability throughout the ACI structure. This strategy allows clients to unify on the infrastructure-as-code aircraft for responsive and environment friendly working fashions for at-scale deployments.
Sunil Gudurvalmiki, Vice President of Product Administration for Information Heart Networking at Cisco, instructed me in a latest interview that the objective of Nexus One is to supply unification and simplification throughout networking materials no matter {hardware} and community working methods, and permit these networking materials to interoperate like by no means earlier than, not simply on the networking layer, but additionally on the coverage layer.
“It’s not a rip-and-replace expertise,” mentioned Sunil. “You don’t need to throw away what it’s a must to go to this new structure. On the foundational stage, we’re constructing EVPN materials, whether or not it’s ACI or NX-OS VXLAN or Hyperfabric—no matter you might be snug with. Nexus One permits clients to function their EVPN materials in a really constant manner utilizing Cisco Nexus Dashboard. You’ve one working mannequin to construct and run the community.”
Cisco is advocating that working system selection will all the time be there. They’re consolidating the administration aircraft underneath the Nexus Dashboard to present the client a single operator expertise. Prospects can use Cisco Nexus One to undertake a hybrid networking operational mannequin with a single administration aircraft and implement a typical coverage throughout totally different material architectures, whether or not that’s Cisco ACI or VXLAN EVPN or Hyperfabric sooner or later.
“We all the time have a standardization angle. We wanted to take ACI improvements to standardization to learn the trade at giant,” Sunil instructed me. “And we wanted to simplify the working expertise with a single administration aircraft.”
Sunil believes that hybrid networking environments want the strategy of Nexus One to unravel long-term operational challenges, together with the price of managing advanced networks. By offering a unified and versatile working mannequin, Cisco hopes to unravel operational complexity and decrease the full price of possession for its clients.
The Nexus One expertise
With Nexus One, the objective is to supply a constant operator expertise by way of Cisco Nexus Dashboard for information heart networking.
A number of the key values delivered by Cisco Nexus One embrace:
- Versatile zero-trust networking fashions with microsegmentation and macrosegmentation
- Superior Layer 4–Layer 7 service insertion in a single or multi-site atmosphere
- Requirements-based material interoperability, together with third-party networks
- Infrastructure-as-code fashions resembling Ansible and Terraform
- Seamless integration with virtualization and container networking architectures
- Turnkey automation
Use instances for Nexus One vary throughout enterprises, service suppliers, public sector, neoclouds, and sovereign AI clouds, supporting each conventional and AI workload deployments.
Cisco’s new software program administration sophistication doesn’t cease there. A key improvement is the working mannequin growth from materials to cloud-native applied sciences, exemplified by Isovalent, an eBPF-based expertise acquired by Cisco in 2024. Isovalent and the open-source, cloud-native networking expertise Cilium, Hubble, and Tetragon can be utilized to construct networking throughout containerized and cloud-native environments with information heart networking materials based mostly on N9000. From an Isovalent perspective, each ACI and NX-OS VXLAN materials are totally supported. An analogous design sample is already being deployed with VMware Cloud Basis. Cisco has already began integrating Isovalent’s expertise into its portfolio, promising to raise operational expertise in Kubernetes networking, observability, and safety.
Closing remarks
With the numerous evolution of Nexus One, Cisco is displaying that it has responded to the evolution of numerous networking environments, whether or not that’s a CPU information heart or a GPU information heart. The broad adoption of open requirements in addition to the trendy software-driven administration structure of Nexus One ought to assist clients combine and remedy probably the most advanced information heart networking challenges.
