Cisco: Cisco Delivers Trailblazing Innovations to Help Cloud Operators Save Energy and Drive Operational Efficiencies

Continuing on its commitment to power an inclusive future for all by connecting more people and things, Cisco today shared new solutions for helping enterprises, webscale and hyperscale companies deliver richer cloud applications and services while balancing their needs for more bandwidth, using less space and power.

Growing Challenges in the Data Center

The applications and workloads we rely on to do our jobs and live our connected lives generate heavy loads of traffic, challenging data center operations for cloud service providers. Operators are balancing shifts in demand requiring them to add performance and capacity while keeping their operations secure, economical, sustainable, and easier to manage. Supporting complex, high-bandwidth and low latency applications like AI/ML, 5G, virtual and augmented reality are driving the need for 800G capacity, along with the need to connect multiple data center buildings together at high data rates.

Cisco’s Advantage

Cisco is leading the way by providing choice to its customers with options for disaggregated open-source operating systems along with integrated, cloud-optimized embedded network operating systems. Customers making the transitions to 100G/400G/800G data center fabrics can rely on Cisco to help achieve the benefits of cost-effective scaling, sustainability and investment protection being demonstrated today in massive internet backbones around the world, featuring high-performance, high capacity switching and routing solutions.

“Cisco marked its moment in history in 2019, debuting the foundation for the Internet for the Future, helping communication service providers around the world build a stronger, more efficient internet to connect more people and things,” said Jonathan Davidson, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Enterprise Networking and Cloud and Mass-scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco. “Today, we are announcing how we can uniquely apply those principles and innovations to support companies designing and building data centers for the future to achieve their sustainability goals. Our approach to meet customers where they are now vs. forcing a one-size-fits-all policy fosters flexible and open operations without restrictions.”

Marking Major Milestones

Cisco Silicon One continues to demonstrate its versatility by expanding to more use cases within the data center. It supports ethernet for optimal interoperability and fully scheduled fabric for ultimate performance of AI/ML traffic, offering customers more flexibility to evolve as their network performance needs change. Today Cisco introduces new routing and switching solutions featuring the G100 processor, which provides the programmability, bandwidth and efficiency necessary for today’s traffic demands. Compared to solutions built from 12.8Tbps switches, the G100 can provide 25.6Tbps with up to a 77% reduction in power and can save nearly 9,000 kg of CO2 emissions per year. (1)

Cisco’s Solutions for Cloud Data Centers

At the Open Compute Project Global Summit today, Cisco is showcasing its portfolio of innovations for cloud operators that will redefine the economics of the cloud, helping customers meet their sustainability goals while boosting performance to support increasing demands for connectivity.

What’s New

Introducing new 800G platforms, Nexus 9232E and Cisco 8111, powered by Silicon One G100 that delivers 25.6T in a single chip using innovative 100G-based SerDes design to drive higher power efficiency and scale in just 1RU.
With 256 x 112G SerDes, these compact platforms support market-leading 32 ports of 800G, including 64 ports of 400GbE or 256 ports of 100GbE using breakout cables to enable significantly higher densities in a small footprint.
These platforms represent major engineering advancements needed to support high-performance connectivity demands, such as with bandwidth-intensive AI/ML compute clusters, and designed for modernizing multi-level data center fabrics in public and private clouds.
In addition to providing operational cost and carbon savings, Cisco is also offering flexibility in design choices, including:
Integrated systems, such as with Cisco Nexus and NX-OS, that support VXLAN, multi-tenant, multi-site, and multi-case as well as ACI, for data center and cloud deployments.
Disaggregated systems, such as with Cisco 8000 using open-source/3rd party Network Operating Systems (NOS) in hyperscaler environments.
Cisco is also introducing two new high-density industry-standard QSFP-DD800 form factor optical transceivers that double the port bandwidth and connect single mode fiber links in the data center up to 2km.
These new optical transceivers allow customers to maximize bandwidth on new 800G platforms with high density breakouts to 400G and 100G interfaces while protecting existing investments with backward compatibility to QSFP transceivers.


Industry Response

“Today, power, energy, and space efficiencies are critical for cloud operators that are spending billions of dollars to run their data centers. What Cisco is offering with its Silicon One solutions demonstrates significant change in the economics for data center operations, offering customers a less is more model that will carry them into the future with plenty of capacity and performance to outpace demand.”

— Ray Mota, CEO and Principal Analyst, ACG Research

“We applaud Cisco on its commitment to open computing with the versatility of its Silicon One architecture that can support high-bandwidth applications like AI/ML. The OCP community can significantly benefit from such disaggregated, open, efficient, and sustainable fabrics.”

— Omar Baldonado, Director, DC Networking, Meta

“We are happy to see that the Cisco 8000 router series powered by Silicon One supports SONiC. The combination of 800G port throughput, architectural flexibility, integrated security, and SONiC support on Cisco platforms provide the community with new choices to build scalable, high-performing solutions based on open networking innovations. SAI on Silicon One enables SONiC users to adopt with a short onboarding time.”

— Dave Maltz, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President, Azure Networking, Microsoft

“As a Cisco partner, Edge relies on Cisco’s technologies for its performance and reliability. So when it came time for Edge to scale its network to handle massive traffic growth and 400Gbe connectivity at mass scale, we turned to Cisco 8000 Series. Through these solutions, we can effectively serve as a major network and cloud provider to our nationally renowned R1 institutions, as well as our growing R2 and R3 institutions.”

— Mark Meara, Vice President of Technical Operations and Chief Information Officer, NJEdge