Introducing Cisco Good Switches for the AI-powered enterprise
This week at Cisco Reside San Diego, we launched a significant leap ahead in enterprise networking: The brand new household of Cisco C9000 Good Switches, purpose-built for the AI-ready campus. These switches ship blazing efficiency, quantum-secure networking, and radically simplified operations—supporting our new realities as AI transforms the way in which we work, collaborate, and function.
From retail environments to manufacturing unit flooring and from working rooms to world campuses, AI is pushing legacy networks past their limits. The rise of high-resolution video, augmented actuality/digital actuality (AR/VR) collaboration, and IoT units intensifies the strain, driving demand for larger bandwidth, lower-latency visitors, and machine-speed safety. Complexity—all the time a problem—has turn out to be a legal responsibility, and but the networks underpinning these shifts had been constructed for an additional time.
That’s why Cisco constructed one thing solely new—an infrastructure basis engineered for the AI period.
Constructed to help AI use circumstances within the enterprise
Cisco Good Switches are the primary switching household engineered particularly for AI-era campus environments. They’re constructed to help AI workloads comparable to AR/VR, pc imaginative and prescient, industrial automation, and a variety of generative AI (GenAI) and agentic use circumstances—whereas guaranteeing the community core scales to fulfill the information gravity of AI visitors.
The primary two fashions—Cisco C9350 Fastened Entry Good Switches and Cisco C9610 Modular Core Good Switches—function key new improvements.
- Programmable for scalability: Cisco Good Switches are constructed on a programmable structure leveraging Cisco SiliconOne application-specific built-in circuits (ASICs), supporting run to completion throughout remoted software slices. Which means that the ASIC can run parallel operations in devoted “slices” with out interruption by different duties. This function helps dealing with a bigger quantity of functions, together with extra complicated ones.
- Blazing efficiency: These new units have a 10x efficiency enchancment over our industry-leading portfolio of switches. Assist for multi-gig and 100G uplinks ensures excessive bandwidth, so AI-heavy workloads don’t create bottlenecks.
- Quantum-ready: Defend at present’s knowledge from tomorrow’s threats with built-in cryptographic agility with help for post-quantum algorithms.
- AI-native telemetry and assurance: Actual-time analytics constructed straight into the change material assist IT detect anomalies, optimize visitors, and proactively troubleshoot with out the necessity for further sensors.
- Unified administration: Switches are managed by one dashboard, enabling end-to-end visibility, zero-touch provisioning, and clever automation.
- Vitality effectivity: Options comparable to Good Energy and hibernation mode assist allow extra sustainable operations, with 30-40% potential vitality financial savings.
These aren’t simply function enhancements—they characterize a rethinking of what entry and aggregation layers should turn out to be within the AI period.
Operational intelligence for the AI period
With the rise in customers, units, applied sciences, cyber adversaries, stakeholders, and expectations, working networks of any measurement could be complicated. When you’ve hundreds of units to handle throughout a worldwide infrastructure, scaling securely is almost inconceivable. Nobody can afford downtime or a expensive mistake. Cisco Good Switches enable you overcome these challenges so you’ll be able to onboard simply, outline insurance policies, improve with minimal disruption, and acquire complete insights throughout each owned and unowned infrastructure—all from a single dashboard.
Managing your community is now simpler than ever. Directors can configure and handle switching, wi-fi, routing, and SD-WAN all from a single dashboard. Quick, frictionless, out-of-the-box provisioning, clever port profiling, and automatic onboarding of Wi-Fi 7 entry factors and multi-gig purchasers remove hours of guide effort and scale back the potential for error.
This simplicity is made potential by intelligence embedded into the change, enabling it to dynamically detect related system varieties and apply context-aware configurations by built-in AI logic. We’ve additionally simplified giant, complicated deployments with the design of a microservices-based structure, elastic scaling, and high-availability designs. Monitoring vitality efficiency metrics has by no means been simpler with vitality insights built-in into the dashboard. Granular, device-level energy analytics, scheduled energy insurance policies, and user-level carbon footprint insights help each IT operations and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives.
Scale extra simply with fewer assets
Cisco Good Switches unlock new ranges of operational agility with wealthy AI and innate intelligence telemetry. This intelligence permits the telemetry system to not solely acquire and report knowledge but additionally to research, interpret, and act on that knowledge in actual time with out requiring exterior techniques to course of it. This supplies alerts and remediation knowledge earlier than customers are impacted. Integrations with ThousandEyes and Splunk present end-to-end visibility from entry layer to SaaS functions. No extra surprises or lifeless ends when points happen outdoors of your community. Now you’ll be able to simply pinpoint the problem and treatment it in your phrases, whether or not within the owned or unowned infrastructure.
Troubleshooting has by no means been simpler with all-new capabilities within the Cisco AI Assistant. The conversational, pure language interface makes it simple for groups to get a view of your community’s general situation. If a problem is going on, Cisco AI Assistant can rapidly determine root causes, counsel treatments, and at your request, implement the motion of your alternative—all with full audit monitoring and role-based entry controls.
We’re taking this simplicity even additional with Cisco AI Canvas, a GenAI workspace throughout the dashboard that helps NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps groups resolve complicated incidents sooner and extra collaboratively. AI Canvas serves as your individual dynamic command middle to handle your community’s particular wants. You possibly can automate duties of your selecting and actively collaborate to speed up the decision of points after they occur. AI Canvas places every part out of your community in a single place, supplies easy visualizations for complicated points, and amplifies your staff’s productiveness tenfold.
Cisco isn’t just serving to simplify operations—we’re reengineering them for a future the place networks assume, adapt, and reply alongside AI workloads. The end result: sooner troubleshooting, larger uptime, decrease operational value, and a community that evolves as quick as what you are promoting.
Safe by design for an unpredictable future
AI is rising because the preeminent device for streamlining enterprise operations. It’s additionally redefining the risk panorama. From AI-generated phishing schemes to adversarial malware and deepfakes, threats have gotten sooner, extra focused, and more and more automated. The brand new Cisco Good Switches are designed not simply to maintain up, however to remain forward.
On the core of this new safety paradigm is the mixing of quantum-resistant applied sciences. Our switches have lengthy featured safe boot and hardened Linux to stop tampering and set up of unauthorized software program. However with quantum computing on the horizon, conventional encryption strategies like RSA, ECC, and Diffie-Hellman have gotten weak. Cisco Good Switches embody quantum safety, future-proofing your community in opposition to present and future threats.
These switches don’t cease at device-level safety. They prolong quantum-resilient encryption into the information airplane itself. By incorporating post-quantum cryptography (PQC) into current requirements like MACsec, IPsec, and WAN MACsec, we guarantee campus-wide knowledge confidentiality—whilst encrypted knowledge traverses more and more complicated, AI-driven topologies. This method interception by rogue units or malicious edge endpoints.
Our switches are additionally the first line of enforcement within the Cisco Common Zero-Belief Community Entry (UZTNA) framework. They dynamically block unauthorized endpoints and lateral motion throughout the change itself, imposing granular safety and entry insurance policies utilizing real-time endpoint context. This removes the necessity to reroute visitors to distant firewalls for primary entry management—releasing bandwidth and decreasing latency. However when superior inspection is required, our new Safety Service Insertion functionality intelligently steers visitors to designated firewalls, guaranteeing optimum use of community and safety assets. And with Reside Defend coming quickly, newly found threats could be mitigated in near-real time—with out requiring picture upgrades or system reboots.
Briefly, Cisco Good Switches are safe by design—from the silicon to the cloud. Constructed for an unpredictable future, they provide safety that adapts as quick as threats evolve.
The trail forward
AI is essentially the most transformative drive in enterprise expertise for the reason that cloud, however it’s solely as efficient because the infrastructure supporting it. With the brand new Cisco Good Switches, we’re giving enterprises the instruments to harness the facility of AI—safely, effectively, and at scale.
The way forward for the enterprise campus is AI-powered, and now, it’s prepared.
A few of the merchandise and options talked about are nonetheless in improvement and shall be made out there as they’re finalized, topic to ongoing evolution in improvement and innovation. The timeline for his or her launch is topic to vary.
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