News
4 min read
Cisco Delivers Trailblazing Innovations to Help Cloud Operators Save Energy and Drive Operational Efficiencies
18 Oct, 2022

News Summary
- Cisco is at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit in San Jose today, spotlighting new innovations across its Nexus 9000 and Cisco 8000 portfolios designed to help enterprise, webscale and hyperscale customers meet sustainability goals.
- New routers and switches powered by Cisco Silicon One, and new high-density optical transceivers all capable of supporting 800G today will help to redefine the economics of the cloud and boost network performance, while improving sustainability and connectivity needs for cloud services.
- Cisco Silicon One enables customers to evolve their AI/ML networks, helping customers to adopt standard ethernet or full scheduled fabric for ultimate performance.
- Introducing new 800G platforms, Nexus 9232E and Cisco 8111, powered by Silicon One G100 that delivers 26.5T 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.
"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 Supporting Resources- Read the blog: Mass-Scale Infrastructure Innovations to Benefit Cloud Providers by Maricio Cruz Covarrubias
- Read the blog: Cisco Nexus: Connect Cloud-Scale Performance and Sustainability by Thomas Scheibe
- Cisco 8000 Series
- Nexus 9000 Series
- Cisco Optics
- Cisco Silicon One