Knowledge facilities have been evolving at an unprecedented tempo. Transformational traits like AI and safety are additional accelerating that evolution. Knowledge middle networking types the inspiration for AI workloads, and it performs a important position in defending the high-value property from subtle AI-driven cyberattacks.
At Cisco, we all the time meet our clients the place they’re. That’s the reason we’re evolving the info middle community structure, addressing the traits reshaping the setting proper now.
Meet Cisco Nexus One, our next-generation knowledge middle networking structure.
To know Nexus One, we have to step again in time. After we launched Cisco Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI) again in 2014, we weren’t simply releasing a brand new structure. We have been basically altering how clients approached the info middle. The {industry} wanted a solution to bridge the hole between conventional, handbook networking and the agility the rising cloud-native world demanded. We launched many {industry} firsts with ACI: group-based microsegmentation, versatile service chaining, object-model APIs, and a controller-based strategy with Cisco Utility Coverage Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to assist clients tackle explosive enterprise progress. It has been a exceptional journey. Greater than 13,000 organizations depend on ACI to energy their most important workloads.
Now, have a look at the horizon. The huge shift towards AI-ready knowledge facilities, the necessity to defend towards AI-driven safety threats, and a transparent need for higher architectural flexibility have grow to be prime priorities. The subsequent section of our knowledge middle networking journey requires us to suppose greater, extra overtly, and flexibly with out compromising backward compatibility. That pondering led to the creation of Cisco Nexus One.
Cisco Nexus One: An structure constructed for flexibility, openness, and scale
I usually hear this query: “Is Nexus One a product, an answer, or an structure?”
The reply is easy: It’s an structure, precisely as ACI is.
If ACI was about trailblazing, creating industry-first improvements, Nexus One is about standardization, flexibility, and selection. We took the groundbreaking ideas that made ACI profitable, together with group-based segmentation, service chaining, and deep observability, and we’re standardizing them by the Web Engineering Activity Pressure (IETF).
By anchoring on the broadly deployed VXLAN EVPN expertise as our baseline, we’re making certain that the improvements you’ve trusted are constructed on open, interoperable requirements.
Nexus One is our dedication to giving our clients and companions an structure that’s open, extensible, and totally backward appropriate with the investments you’ve already made. It’s prepared for the brand new AI/ML workloads whereas delivering end-to-end safety.
Cisco Cloud Management: Bringing AgenticOps capabilities to Nexus One
At Cisco Stay 2026 Las Vegas, we introduced Cisco Cloud Management, our single, unified AgenticOps platform for managing the whole Cisco product portfolio—by each people and AI brokers. AI Canvas in Cisco Cloud Management is a reside, interactive workspace, generated dynamically by reside AI brokers to deal with the problems at hand.
Nexus One integrates into Cisco Cloud Management to carry the info middle networking portfolio beneath a Cisco-wide unified administration airplane. AI brokers inside Cisco Cloud Management’s AI Canvas leverage the MCP server API on Nexus One controllers (Nexus Dashboard and Nexus Hyperfabric) to carry out really agentic operations for fast-tracking diagnostics, triaging, and situation decision.
Your knowledge middle, your method: Constructed on first rules
To know how Nexus One adjustments the sport, allow us to have a look at the 4 layers of the networking stack. We’ve designed Nexus One to offer flexibility at each layer, as a result of no two knowledge facilities are precisely alike.
- The silicon layer: basis of efficiency. We’re transferring past a hard and fast path to help a broader vary of silicon choices. Nexus One helps Cisco Cloud Scale, Cisco Silicon One, and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet swap silicon. This provides you the flexibleness to decide on the {hardware} basis that most accurately fits your efficiency, energy, and workload necessities, whether or not you’re operating high-performance AI coaching clusters or AI inferencing, AI storage, CPU workloads, or out-of-band administration networks.
- The methods layer: the {hardware} anchor. Our flagship Cisco N9000 Collection Switches stay the {hardware} anchor of the structure. It continues to ship the high-performance, dependable {hardware} you’re accustomed to, now paired with essentially the most superior optics obtainable. Within the AI period, the bodily layer is simply as important because the software program layer, and we aren’t compromising on both.
- The software program layer: working system selection. Nexus One helps Cisco ACI, NX-OS, and now SONiC. Lots of you have got developed specialised experience throughout completely different working methods, and we wish to provide the flexibility to decide on the community working system that greatest aligns along with your operational technique and expertise pool whereas enabling full interoperability throughout these software program choices. By including SONiC to our portfolio, we’re delivering options that tackle our clients’ evolving wants. To that extent, we not too long ago introduced that Cisco will help SONiC as an choice for Cisco N9000 Collection Switches.
- The working mannequin: management and agility. We’ve expanded our administration choices to offer extra management and agility. You may leverage the on-premises energy of Nexus Dashboard or embrace the cloud-native, SaaS-based effectivity of Nexus Hyperfabric.
Desk 1. Nexus One administration choices
Nexus Dashboard: On-premises administration platform for Nexus One. |
Nexus Hyperfabric: Cloud-management platform for Nexus One. |
|---|---|
| Nexus Dashboard delivers centralized automation and administration for Nexus One on-premises knowledge middle networking. It simplifies community operations by a single, built-in management level. Nexus Dashboard gives unified visibility throughout your cloth, automates coverage enforcement, and streamlines day-2 operations. Nexus Dashboard will help Nexus 9000 automation operating SONiC alongside Cisco NX-OS and Cisco ACI. The result’s higher flexibility, reliability, sooner troubleshooting, and lowered operational overhead, serving to IT infrastructure groups preserve stability and safety whereas controlling prices throughout advanced environments. | The most recent addition to our portfolio, Nexus Hyperfabric delivers scalable, cloud-managed, full-stack cloth deployment and lifecycle automation for knowledge middle infrastructure. It takes ease of use to the following degree with progressive options equivalent to design before you purchase, plug-and-play deployment, easy-to-implement cabling plans with real-time suggestions, assertion-based monitoring, and an API-first strategy that permits clients to construct VXLAN EVPN materials at scale. It extends deployment-ready capabilities to GPU servers and SmartNICs, along with networking for AI materials. Hyperfabric will proceed to evolve, including help for multi-site, group-based microsegmentation with Endpoint Safety Teams (ESGs), plus monitoring and picture administration for Cisco NX-OS switches alongside the native SONiC switches it already manages. |
No matter your selection, the purpose is identical: simplifying day-0, day-1, and day-N operations with constant technical and enterprise outcomes.
The requirements beneath: Requirements to carry the ACI coverage mannequin into VXLAN EVPN
The actual-world operational worth of Nexus One is inseparable from the requirements that govern how materials talk, change state, and implement coverage. The IETF has been advancing a physique of labor that straight underpins the distributed coverage enforcement and cloth interoperability fashions central to this structure. With Nexus One, we wish to supply the selection to clients to construct knowledge middle materials which are open requirements compliant.
To standardize the policy-based segmentation pioneered with ACI, we actively contributed to 3 key IETF drafts.
- draft-smith-vxlan-group-policy: defines how a Group Coverage ID is encoded as a flag and metadata discipline straight throughout the VXLAN header
- draft-wlin-bess-group-policy-id-extended-community: introduces a BGP prolonged neighborhood to hold that Group Coverage ID by the EVPN management airplane
- draft-lrss-bess-evpn-group-policy: binds the 2 collectively right into a coherent EVPN Group Coverage framework
Collectively, these drafts outline the Group Coverage Object (GPO) commonplace—a direct, open-standards evolution of ACI’s ESG segmentation mannequin into native VXLAN EVPN materials.
NX-OS has applied ESG and the related contracts for microsegmentation and repair chaining utilizing the GPO commonplace. Hyperfabric will comply with go well with based mostly on the identical requirements. You may obtain constant microsegmentation and repair chaining outcomes along with your cloth of selection.
How will you lengthen the notion of coverage throughout materials? Are you able to arrange contracts between ESGs residing in two completely different cloth varieties (Ex: ESG in NX-OS and ESG in ACI)? Sure, you may, with enhanced EVPN Border Gateways.
Enhanced Border Gateways: What’s “enhanced” about them?
Border Gateways (BGWs) existed in VXLAN EVPN for some time. BGW is the machine that stitches a number of cloth domains collectively on the management and knowledge airplane boundary. It terminates inbound VXLAN tunnels from site-internal VTEPs, re-originates them towards distant websites utilizing its personal anycast Digital IP (VIP) tackle, and masks the inner VTEP topology from the remainder of the community. Every BGW acts as an autonomous system boundary, utilizing eBGP between websites and iBGP inside a web site, which provides you clear failure isolation and VTEP scale containment.
BGW implementation in Nexus One relies on RFC 9014 and the IETF multi-site EVPN draft (draft-sharma-bess-multi-site-evpn) that Cisco co-authored. ACI BGW implementation is the newest to adapt to those requirements.
BGW implementation is enhanced to help the GPO commonplace. It understands the ESG format within the knowledge airplane and management airplane. It may possibly translate between ESG tags because the packets go from one cloth to a different cloth. BGW also can implement coverage relying on the contracts outlined. The result’s that NX-OS materials, ACI, SONiC, and Nexus Hyperfabric–based mostly materials can seamlessly interconnect with constant coverage enforcement with out compromising the segmentation mannequin you have got invested in.
Mobility: Essential for workloads too
Some of the operationally demanding challenges in hybrid multi-fabric infrastructure is transferring a reside workload between materials by itself schedule. This relocation should happen seamlessly with out disrupting energetic companies. This functionality requires that the vacation spot cloth current an similar Layer 2 area to the relocating workload, despite the fact that the bodily underlay connecting the 2 materials is a routed Layer 3 community.
That is the place the BGW structure pays direct operational dividends. With Nexus One, the workload experiences no IP tackle change, no TCP session teardown, and no ARP decision delay when it strikes throughout heterogenous materials. The Layer 2 broadcast area follows it throughout the material boundary by the widespread EVPN management airplane, with the BGW dealing with tunnel re-origination transparently. As a result of Nexus One associates coverage with workload id relatively than with the bodily or digital port the workload is connected to, the coverage binding—together with any GPO-based segmentation guidelines—migrates with the workload robotically.
This distinctive functionality enables you to transfer workloads with higher flexibility, at a time of your selecting, relatively than a pressured deadline imposed by infrastructure constraints.
What about ACI?
Nexus One encompasses and extends ACI. If you’re operating ACI right this moment, you might be already operating Nexus One. The improvements ACI pioneered have gotten open, standards-based capabilities that any Nexus One cloth can run. ACI is among the selections described within the software program layer within the structure. Nexus One will not be a alternative for ACI; it embraces and enhances ACI. ACI will proceed to be supported as a part of Nexus One.
Nexus One advantages: Seamless, safe, scalable—but easy
Right here’s how Nexus One delivers on every of those 4 guarantees—seamless, safe, scalable, and easy.
- Seamless interoperability: For many of you, the info middle will not be a “rip and change” setting. It’s a dwelling ecosystem constructed over years of deliberate funding. Nexus One is constructed for that actuality. It allows seamless interconnectivity and interoperability between completely different cloth architectures. You may deploy VXLAN EVPN materials alongside ACI materials, with Layer 2 and Layer 3 stretches and coverage consistency throughout each. Whether or not you might be operating a standard enterprise software or a cloud-native software operating in digital machines or Kubernetes deployments with Isovalent and Cilium, Nexus One gives a unified administration airplane and a constant expertise for full lifecycle administration. This implies you should not have to decide on between the automation of ACI and the flexibleness of NX-OS or SONiC. You may have every little thing managed by a single, cohesive structure.
- Safety at each layer: On this period of Mythos and AI-driven cyber threats, the imply time to use a vulnerability has dropped from days to hours and even to minutes. Defending high-value digital property within the knowledge middle isn’t just essential, it’s enterprise important. Nexus One expands group-based coverage throughout a number of materials utilizing ESG to implement microsegmentation in actual time and mitigate safety threats as they emerge. That segmentation can lengthen all the way in which into Kubernetes clusters with Isovalent integration. Prospects can take safety to the following degree after they implement Nexus One with Cisco N9300 Sensible Switches, which provide stateful microsegmentation enforced on the DPU constructed into Sensible Switches. And Cisco Stay Defend, constructed into the inspiration of Nexus One, can present CVE shields with out having to patch the whole infrastructure throughout a vulnerability window or reload the switches. Safety is infused into each layer of Nexus One.
- Scale, on each ends of the spectrum: After we take into consideration scale, we aren’t simply fascinated about large-scale knowledge facilities with lots of and hundreds of switches; we’re additionally fascinated about small-scale knowledge facilities, edge knowledge facilities with tens of switches. Nexus One permits for constructing and working large-scale knowledge facilities and small-scale knowledge facilities in a constant and cost-effective method. Hyperfabric is a wonderful selection for patrons who function small-to-midsize knowledge facilities, edge knowledge facilities, and out-of-band administration networks, and who’ve embraced SaaS-based administration. Nexus Dashboard affords the on-premises choice, going all the way in which as much as 1000 switches in a single cluster. On the decrease finish of the spectrum, clients also can deploy Nexus Dashboard on a single node or a digital node to maintain it price efficient for smaller deployments.
- Easy to function: Networking is inherently advanced; operations don’t must be. As networks develop in measurement, the working mannequin must get easier. Nexus One working fashions deal with simplifying operations for operators. This strategy is identical whether or not you might be utilizing on-premises Nexus Dashboard Controller or the SaaS-based Nexus Hyperfabric Controller. It additionally holds true whether or not you’re a human consumer, an API consumer driving operations with community as code, or an AI agent driving agent operations. Simplicity and robustness sit on the core of each functionality we construct.
A dedication to our knowledge middle networking clients
The transition to AI-ready infrastructure is a marathon, not a dash. It requires a accomplice who understands the complexities of your present setting whereas sustaining a transparent imaginative and prescient for the place the {industry} is heading.
With Cisco Nexus One, we meet you the place you might be. We’re offering a future outlined by open requirements, safety, operational selection, and unparalleled scale. We’re prepared for what comes subsequent, and we’re constructing it with you and for you.
Extra sources:
