The new box extends Cisco Nexus 9000 Series portfolio of high-density 800G aggregation switches for the data center fabric, Cisco stated. The Nexus 9000 data center switches are a core component of the vendor’s enterprise AI offerings. They support congestion-management and flow-control algorithms and deliver the right latency and telemetry to meet the design requirements of AI/ML fabrics, Cisco stated.
With the Cisco N9100 Series, Cisco now supports Nvidia Cloud Partner (NCP)-compliant reference architecture.
“This development is particularly significant for neocloud and sovereign cloud customers building data centers with capacities ranging from thousands to potentially hundreds of thousands of GPUs, as it allows them to diversify their supply chains effectively,” wrote Will Eatherton, senior vice president of Cisco networking engineering, in a blog post about the news.
An add-on license lets customers extend the NCP reference architecture to define how customers can mix and mingle Nvidia Spectrum-X adaptive routing capability with Cisco Nexus 9300 Series switches and Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet SuperNICs.
“The combination of low latency and congestion-aware, per-packet load balancing on Cisco 9300 switches, along with out-of-order packet handling and end-to-end congestion management on Nvidia SuperNICs, significantly enhances network performance. These improvements are essential for AI networks, optimizing critical metrics such as job completion time,” Eatherton wrote.
In addition to neoclouds and sovereign buildouts, enterprise customers are a target, according to Futuriom’s Raynovich.
