Cisco has unveiled new knowledge middle {hardware}, networking, safety, and IT administration options because it appears to develop its share of the AI infrastructure market.
On the Cisco Stay convention in San Diego at the moment (June 10), the corporate introduced AI Canvas, a shared generative AI workspace the place community, safety, and IT groups can collaboratively visualize telemetry knowledge, determine root causes, and remediate networking bottlenecks, whereas figuring out safety vulnerabilities.
AI Canvas, constructed with AI brokers, consists of an AI assistant that permits directors to work together with the software utilizing pure language. AI Canvas – which Cisco will take a look at with clients this fall – is a part of the corporate’s “AgenticOps” technique, which makes use of AI brokers to automate IT operations. It analyzes real-time telemetry from Meraki, ThousandEyes, Splunk, and others and may recommend and even automate remediation.
Analyst Will Townsend of Moor Insights & Technique mentioned the software is compelling for knowledge middle operators.
“What Cisco is doing is mainly taking 40-plus years of data in troubleshooting points and placing that into a big language mannequin,” Townsend mentioned in an interview with DCN.
“It’s fully customizable and supplies a chance to make use of generative AI to troubleshoot and remediate points.”
Cisco mentioned it’s the “infrastructure firm that powers AI in the course of the agentic motion.” Picture: Alamy.
AI Focus
The AI Canvas announcement displays Cisco’s strategic deal with agentic AI, which firm executives see as the following section of the AI revolution. With its {hardware}, networking, and safety bulletins at the moment, the corporate is positioning itself to additional make the most of the booming AI infrastructure market.
“We’re transferring from this wonderful wave that began two-and-a-half years in the past with ChatGPT… to now transferring to brokers that may full duties and jobs absolutely autonomously, on behalf of a human,” mentioned Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, throughout a media briefing.
“We’re the infrastructure firm that powers AI in the course of the agentic motion.”
Nexus Dashboard Developments
At Cisco Stay, Cisco additionally introduced a raft of networking improvements, together with a brand new unified Nexus Dashboard. The corporate mentioned this dashboard allows organizations to consolidate the administration of their knowledge middle networks, together with storage space networks and AI/ML materials.
The brand new unified Nexus Dashboard, out there in July 2025, converges Cisco’s Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Cisco’s NX-OS VXLAN EVPN materials.
“It’s an try to flatten community administration, so that you don’t have all these disparate networks that require particular person administration,” mentioned Townsend.
Cisco additionally introduced the provision of Cisco Clever Packet Circulate, which allows clients to optimize AI workloads by offering real-time telemetry and visibility throughout networks, GPUs, and distributed AI jobs.
“Cisco is weaving collectively a whole lot of their observability and telemetry capabilities, and in doing so, it supplies heightened community assurance,” Townsend mentioned. “So, you possibly can detect site visitors stream points and optimize it.”
Extra From Cisco Stay 2025
On the community safety entrance, Cisco prolonged its Good Swap portfolio with two new switches with built-in safety administration that may be deployed top-of-rack in knowledge facilities or in campus networks, Townsend mentioned.
In February, Cisco launched its household of N9300 Sequence Good Switches, which mix networking and safety companies. These switches assist knowledge middle operators streamline infrastructure and assist AI workloads.
At Cisco Stay, the corporate additionally introduced:
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Hybrid Mesh Firewalls, together with the brand new Cisco Safe Firewall 6100 Sequence, which affords 200 Gbps per rack unit.
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Configurable AI Pods, together with servers, storage, networking, and AI software program. The corporate mentioned clients can order the brand new high-end Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Version GPU on Cisco UCS C845A M8 servers.
“You may run your inference workloads quite a bit sooner the place real-time responsiveness issues: on the sting or throughout the distributed community,” mentioned analyst Matt Kimball of Moor Insights & Technique.
Total, Townsend mentioned Cisco is delivering within the three key areas essential for AI infrastructure: networking, safety, and compute. The corporate has put a whole lot of sources into product growth, and it displays within the Cisco Stay bulletins, he mentioned.
“I liken an entire fashionable AI infrastructure stack to a three-legged stool, offering the requisite compute, networking, and safety performance,” Townsend mentioned. “From my perspective, Cisco’s bulletins tackle all three parts to assist enterprises unlock the transformative potential of generative and agentic AI functions and workloads at scale.”
