Introducing Cisco Good Switches for the AI-powered enterprise
This week at Cisco Dwell San Diego, we launched a serious 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 facility flooring and from working rooms to international 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 stress, driving demand for increased bandwidth, lower-latency visitors, and machine-speed safety. Complexity—all the time a problem—has develop into a legal responsibility, and but the networks underpinning these shifts have been constructed for one more time.
That’s why Cisco constructed one thing completely new—an infrastructure basis engineered for the AI period.
Constructed to assist AI use instances within the enterprise
Cisco Good Switches are the primary switching household engineered particularly for AI-era campus environments. They’re constructed to assist AI workloads corresponding to AR/VR, pc imaginative and prescient, industrial automation, and a variety of generative AI (GenAI) and agentic use instances—whereas guaranteeing the community core scales to fulfill the info 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 utility 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 advanced 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.
- How-ready: Defend right now’s knowledge from tomorrow’s threats with built-in cryptographic agility with assist for post-quantum algorithms.
- AI-native telemetry and assurance: Actual-time analytics constructed instantly into the swap cloth assist IT detect anomalies, optimize visitors, and proactively troubleshoot with out the necessity for further sensors.
- Unified administration: Switches are managed via one dashboard, enabling end-to-end visibility, zero-touch provisioning, and clever automation.
- Vitality effectivity: Options corresponding 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 develop into 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 may be advanced. When you’ve got hundreds of units to handle throughout a world infrastructure, scaling securely is sort of unattainable. Nobody can afford downtime or a pricey mistake. Cisco Good Switches enable you to overcome these challenges so you possibly can onboard simply, outline insurance policies, improve with minimal disruption, and achieve 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 get rid of hours of guide effort and cut back the potential for error.
This simplicity is made potential via intelligence embedded into the swap, enabling it to dynamically detect related machine varieties and apply context-aware configurations via built-in AI logic. We’ve additionally simplified massive, advanced 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 assist each IT operations and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives.
Scale extra simply with fewer sources
Cisco Good Switches unlock new ranges of operational agility with Wealthy Ai and innate intelligence telemetry. This intelligence allows the telemetry system to not solely acquire and report knowledge but additionally to investigate, interpret, and act on that knowledge in actual time with out requiring exterior methods to course of it. This offers 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 possibly can 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 straightforward for groups to get a view of your community’s total situation. If a difficulty is going on, Cisco AI Assistant can rapidly determine root causes, recommend 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 Canvasa GenAI workspace inside the dashboard that helps NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps groups resolve advanced incidents sooner and extra collaboratively. AI Canvas serves as your personal dynamic command middle to deal with your community’s particular wants. You possibly can automate duties of your selecting and actively collaborate to speed up the decision of points once they occur. AI Canvas places every little thing out of your community in a single place, offers easy visualizations for advanced points, and amplifies your workforce’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, increased uptime, decrease operational value, and a community that evolves as quick as your corporation.
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 forestall 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 susceptible. Cisco Good Switches embody quantum safety, future-proofing your community towards present and future threats.
These switches don’t cease at device-level safety. They prolong quantum-resilient encryption into the info airplane itself. By incorporating post-quantum cryptography (PQC) into current requirements like MACsec, IPsecand WAN MACsecwe guarantee campus-wide knowledge confidentiality—at the same time as encrypted knowledge traverses more and more advanced, AI-driven topologies. This strategy 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 inside the swap itselfimplementing granular safety and entry insurance policies utilizing real-time endpoint context. This removes the necessity to reroute visitors to distant firewalls for fundamental entry management—liberating 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 sources. And with Dwell Defend coming quickly, newly found threats may be mitigated in near-real time—with out requiring picture upgrades or machine reboots.
In brief, 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 probably the most transformative drive in enterprise know-how for the reason that cloud, nevertheless 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 growth and shall be made accessible as they’re finalized, topic to ongoing evolution in growth and innovation. The timeline for his or her launch is topic to vary.
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