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Technicians working on installing cables in a data center

Technology

Cisco deploys AI-ready data center quickly, scales for the future

Cisco IT designed an AI-ready infrastructure with Cisco compute and networking that supports AI training and inferencing for 25+ use cases across the business. Here's how.

Watch video (2:32) Read blog

The ask from the business

Cisco IT needed to build an AI cluster to support model training and inferencing for multiple teams across the business.

Outcomes

Hear from the team

Jon Woolwine, Technical Systems Engineering and Jag Kahlon, Principal IT Engineer, explain how this new infrastructure was launched in only 3 months and expanded to support dozens of use cases.

Additional insights

Modularity and flexibility to scale

"Not only were we able to support the needs of the business today, but we’re designing how our data centers need to evolve for the future and the modularity and flexibility of Cisco’s infrastructure gives us confidence that we can keep scaling with the business."

Jon Woolwine

Director, Technical Systems Engineering

Supports traditional and AI workloads

"This was more than just an innovative solution. It was the beginning of Cisco’s journey to scale its data centers for AI because it supports both our traditional and AI workloads."

Jag Kahlon

Principal IT Engineer

Importance of management tools

"The AI network we initially build uses Cisco 8000 running SONiC. There were no mangement tools. The enterprise AI network we just built on Nexus-- all of the Nexus gear was configured 100% through Cisco Nexus Dashboard. And yes, it made it so much easier."

John Banner

Technical Systems Architect

Leveraging the power available

"As long as we’re leveraging the power available to the data center, you know, you’re utilizing your most expensive asset when building a data center. So, if we weren’t able to distribute the load throughout multiple cabinets, then we would have had to build new capacity, which is 18 to 24 months to build out new capacity."

Randy Heaslett

Principal Engineer

Let's power an inclusive future for all