The best breakthroughs are sometimes those that make the inconceivable easy. With the fast pace of AI innovation, Cisco acknowledged it was time to ship that breakthrough. Learn the way Cisco IT deployed Nexus Hyperfabric as buyer zero to assist design, deploy, and handle AI infrastructure with extra pace and ease than ever earlier than.
AI simplification on the horizon
After greater than 27 years working in knowledge facilities, I’ve seen firsthand how a lot of a headache it may be to design, construct, and handle AI infrastructure — whether or not you’re supporting core enterprise purposes or standing up the subsequent wave of AI workloads. It takes a monumental funding of capital, effort, time, and assets to make it work — an enormous balancing act. As soon as it’s up and operating, it’s advanced to function, scale, and derive worth from. On daily basis of delay comes at an enormous price, from wasted GPU lifespan to utility prices to alternative prices.
In my position, pace and simplification to the AI infrastructure construct course of would fully rework how I’m capable of do my job. In the end, pace and ease are the important thing to lessening the burden of those prices and unlocking the utmost worth of AI.
In mid-2025, Cisco management tasked my staff and I with constructing an AI cluster that would help our inner AI assistant — a robust device that has elevated worker productiveness by 73%. All through the summer time of 2025, our product and IT groups got here collectively to make that occur at our facility in Allen, TX. We got down to construct this AI cluster in file time, hoping to match the unprecedented pace of AI innovation.
Fortunately, Cisco had already been engaged on an answer that would rework this course of, and this offered a golden alternative to step in as Buyer Zero. Enter Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric — Cisco’s new full stack AI infrastructure answer.
Simplicity as Buyer Zero
Nexus fabric is a cloud-managed community material as a service that permits organizations to simply design, deploy, handle, and scale a number of materials globally with minimal expertise. It’s the last word device for community engineers — even these with little-to-no expertise in constructing and AI materials. It presents a vertically built-in strategy that unifies on-premise community, compute, GPUs, and storage.
We began with a clean slate. After deciding on a gift template and inputting our desired specs (like cluster measurement, {hardware}, and so on.), Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric gave us a complete blueprint for our new AI material—with each port, cable, server, and change mapped intimately to maximise efficiency and effectivity. All executed instantly.
This screenshot exhibits an summary of the Hyperfabric-planned blueprint for our AI cluster.
However this isn’t only a design device. As soon as we validated the design, Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric’s integration with our ordering instruments allowed us to generate a invoice of supplies based mostly on the blueprint, and order the whole lot we would have liked—all of the GPUs, servers, and cabling—with the press of a button.
Shortly thereafter, our supplies arrived in Texas and we totally constructed and configured the. community in simply six days. Processes that used to take so long as six months took simply days. It grew to become clear: The period of simplified community engineering was upon us.
This video exhibits the site of the set up as my staff and I had been standing it up. This exhibits all the {hardware} within the format that was designed and configured by Hyperfabric.
A brand new regular: Accessible administration for the AI period
With Nexus Hyperfabric, Day 0 and Day 1 operations had been fully remodeled for us. It additionally raises the bar for Day 2 community operations. With its networking controller element, Nexus Hyperfabric delivers a technological shift in the best way we monitor and handle our material, yielding quicker, extra prescriptive remediation,and making it simpler for us to maintain materials on-line and steady.
The system presents issues to us in messages like: “this cable has been pulled” or “this server‑to‑change hyperlink is down.” This helps us zero in on the reason for the issue immediately as an alternative of spending hours troubleshooting. In relation to our means to maintain our AI infrastructure operating and maximize ROI, that is an absolute recreation changer.
That is all doable as a result of Nexus Hyperfabric doesn’t use typical protocols like syslog or Easy Community Administration (SNMP); as an alternative, it pioneers a brand new protocol that verifies community standing in opposition to the blueprint. This strategy permits even these with out deep community engineering experience to have the ability to preserve our material resilient, even in probably the most demanding environments.
With our material in Allen, anybody in our IT group can troubleshoot when issues come up, not simply skilled community engineers. This degree of accessibility delivers resilience that has by no means earlier than been doable, permitting our purposes to remain resilient and our staff to remain productive.
The convergence of simplicity and pace
For Cisco IT, Nexus Hyperfabric solves several of the key issues which have traditionally hindered our means to construct and handle AI infrastructure with pace and effectivity:
- Velocity to deploy: Nexus Hyperfabric remodeled our AI cluster deployment time from six months to only six days. By automating design, producing optimized blueprints, and integrating with ordering programs, it enabled fast build-out and configuration. This maximized our infrastructure lifespan, ROI, and time-to-value.
- Simplicity in deployment and administration: Nexus Hyperfabric makes AI material deployment and administration accessible for IT generalists, not simply community engineers. Its cloud-managed design guides non-experts by means of deployment and operations, and blueprint-based monitoring offers clear, actionable insights. This empowers IT generalists to keep up resilient materials with out deep networking experience.
Compounding benefits
As highly effective as these outcomes are, the true energy is unlocked when all of it comes collectively: the accessibility of Nexus Hyperfabric and the ability of Cisco’s 6000 Sequence switches, UCS servers, Silicon One, and optics. Once they all come collectively, they allow us to ship AI infrastructure that delivers extra significant worth to our prospects and staff, extra shortly than ever earlier than.
For companies seeking to construct AI infrastructure that solves actual issues shortly and at scale, Nexus Hyperfabric might be the distinction between profitable and unsuccessful builds.
Whereas we glance to the previous for inspiration, it’s clear that the way forward for AI infrastructure will probably be outlined by how merely, shortly, and successfully it may be constructed and managed. Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric has been the last word device in serving to us accomplish this.
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