Knowledge facilities have been evolving at an unprecedented tempo. Transformational traits like AI and safety are additional accelerating that evolution. Knowledge middle networking kinds the inspiration for AI workloads, and it performs a crucial position in defending the high-value belongings from subtle AI-driven cyberattacks.
At Cisco, we all the time meet our prospects the place they’re. That’s the reason we’re evolving the information middle community structure, addressing the traits reshaping the atmosphere proper now.
Meet Cisco Nexus One, our next-generation knowledge middle networking structure.
To grasp Nexus One, we have to step again in time. Once we launched Cisco Software Centric Infrastructure (ACI) again in 2014, we weren’t simply releasing a brand new structure. We have been basically altering how prospects approached the information middle. The {industry} wanted a approach to bridge the hole between conventional, handbook networking and the agility the rising cloud-native world demanded. We launched many {industry} firsts with ACI: group-based microsegmentation, versatile service chaining, object-model APIs, and a controller-based method with Cisco Software Coverage Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to assist prospects handle explosive enterprise progress. It has been a outstanding journey. Greater than 13,000 organizations depend on ACI to energy their most important workloads.
Now, have a look at the horizon. The large shift towards AI-ready knowledge facilities, the necessity to shield towards AI-driven safety threats, and a transparent need for higher architectural flexibility have turn into prime priorities. The following part of our knowledge middle networking journey requires us to assume larger, extra brazenly, and flexibly with out compromising backward compatibility. That pondering led to the creation of Cisco Nexus One.
Cisco Nexus One: An structure constructed for flexibility, openness, and scale
I usually hear this query: “Is Nexus One a product, an answer, or an structure?”
The reply is easy: It’s an structure, precisely as ACI is.
If ACI was about trailblazing, creating industry-first improvements, Nexus One is about standardization, flexibility, and selection. We took the groundbreaking ideas that made ACI profitable, together with group-based segmentation, service chaining, and deep observability, and we’re standardizing them by means of the Web Engineering Activity Power (IETF).
By anchoring on the broadly deployed VXLAN EVPN expertise as our baseline, we’re making certain that the improvements you’ve trusted are constructed on open, interoperable requirements.
Nexus One is our dedication to giving our prospects and companions an structure that’s open, extensible, and absolutely backward appropriate with the investments you’ve already made. It’s prepared for the brand new AI/ML workloads whereas delivering end-to-end safety.
Cisco Cloud Management: Bringing AgenticOps capabilities to Nexus One
At Cisco Dwell 2026 Las Vegas, we introduced Cisco Cloud Management, our single, unified AgenticOps platform for managing the whole Cisco product portfolio—by each people and AI brokers. AI Canvas in Cisco Cloud Management is a dwell, interactive workspace, generated dynamically by dwell AI brokers to concentrate on the problems at hand.
Nexus One integrates into Cisco Cloud Management to carry the information middle networking portfolio beneath a Cisco-wide unified administration airplane. AI brokers inside Cisco Cloud Management’s AI Canvas leverage the MCP server API on Nexus One controllers (Nexus Dashboard and Nexus Hyperfabric) to carry out actually agentic operations for fast-tracking diagnostics, triaging, and challenge decision.
Your knowledge middle, your means: Constructed on first rules
To grasp how Nexus One adjustments the sport, allow us to have a look at the 4 layers of the networking stack. We’ve designed Nexus One to supply flexibility at each layer, as a result of no two knowledge facilities are precisely alike.
- The silicon layer: basis of efficiency. We’re shifting past a set path to assist a broader vary of silicon choices. Nexus One helps Cisco Cloud Scale, Cisco Silicon One, and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet swap silicon. This offers you the flexibleness to decide on the {hardware} basis that most accurately fits your efficiency, energy, and workload necessities, whether or not you’re working high-performance AI coaching clusters or AI inferencing, AI storage, CPU workloads, or out-of-band administration networks.
- The techniques layer: the {hardware} anchor. Our flagship Cisco N9000 Sequence Switches stay the {hardware} anchor of the structure. It continues to ship the high-performance, dependable {hardware} you’re accustomed to, now paired with probably the most superior optics accessible. Within the AI period, the bodily layer is simply as crucial because the software program layer, and we aren’t compromising on both.
- The software program layer: working system selection. Nexus One helps Cisco ACI, NX-OS, and now SONiC. Lots of you could have developed specialised experience throughout totally different working techniques, and we wish to provide the flexibility to decide on the community working system that greatest aligns together with your operational technique and expertise pool whereas enabling full interoperability throughout these software program choices. By including SONiC to our portfolio, we’re delivering options that handle our prospects’ evolving wants. To that extent, we just lately introduced that Cisco will assist SONiC as an choice for Cisco N9000 Sequence Switches.
- The working mannequin: management and agility. We’ve expanded our administration choices to supply extra management and agility. You possibly can leverage the on-premises energy of Nexus Dashboard or embrace the cloud-native, SaaS-based effectivity of Nexus Hyperfabric.
Desk 1. Nexus One administration choices
Nexus Dashboard: On-premises administration platform for Nexus One. |
Nexus Hyperfabric: Cloud-management platform for Nexus One. |
|---|---|
| Nexus Dashboard delivers centralized automation and administration for Nexus One on-premises knowledge middle networking. It simplifies community operations by means of a single, built-in management level. Nexus Dashboard gives unified visibility throughout your material, automates coverage enforcement, and streamlines day-2 operations. Nexus Dashboard will assist Nexus 9000 automation working SONiC alongside Cisco NX-OS and Cisco ACI. The result’s higher flexibility, reliability, sooner troubleshooting, and lowered operational overhead, serving to IT infrastructure groups keep stability and safety whereas controlling prices throughout complicated environments. | The most recent addition to our portfolio, Nexus Hyperfabric delivers scalable, cloud-managed, full-stack material deployment and lifecycle automation for knowledge middle infrastructure. It takes ease of use to the following degree with modern options akin to design before you purchase, plug-and-play deployment, easy-to-implement cabling plans with real-time suggestions, assertion-based monitoring, and an API-first method that permits prospects to construct VXLAN EVPN materials at scale. It extends deployment-ready capabilities to GPU servers and SmartNICs, along with networking for AI materials. Hyperfabric will proceed to evolve, including assist for multi-site, group-based microsegmentation with Endpoint Safety Teams (ESGs), plus monitoring and picture administration for Cisco NX-OS switches alongside the native SONiC switches it already manages. |
No matter your selection, the aim is identical: simplifying day-0, day-1, and day-N operations with constant technical and enterprise outcomes.
The requirements beneath: Requirements to carry the ACI coverage mannequin into VXLAN EVPN
The actual-world operational worth of Nexus One is inseparable from the requirements that govern how materials talk, trade state, and implement coverage. The IETF has been advancing a physique of labor that instantly underpins the distributed coverage enforcement and material interoperability fashions central to this structure. With Nexus One, we wish to provide the selection to prospects to construct knowledge middle materials which might be open requirements compliant.
To standardize the policy-based segmentation pioneered with ACI, we actively contributed to a few key IETF drafts.
- draft-smith-vxlan-group-policy: defines how a Group Coverage ID is encoded as a flag and metadata discipline instantly throughout the VXLAN header
- draft-wlin-bess-group-policy-id-extended-community: introduces a BGP prolonged neighborhood to hold that Group Coverage ID by means of the EVPN management airplane
- draft-lrss-bess-evpn-group-policy: binds the 2 collectively right into a coherent EVPN Group Coverage framework
Collectively, these drafts outline the Group Coverage Object (GPO) customary—a direct, open-standards evolution of ACI’s ESG segmentation mannequin into native VXLAN EVPN materials.
NX-OS has applied ESG and the related contracts for microsegmentation and repair chaining utilizing the GPO customary. Hyperfabric will observe go well with based mostly on the identical requirements. You possibly can obtain constant microsegmentation and repair chaining outcomes together with your material of selection.
How will you lengthen the notion of coverage throughout materials? Are you able to arrange contracts between ESGs residing in two totally different material varieties (Ex: ESG in NX-OS and ESG in ACI)? Sure, you possibly can, with enhanced EVPN Border Gateways.
Enhanced Border Gateways: What’s “enhanced” about them?
Border Gateways (BGWs) existed in VXLAN EVPN for some time. BGW is the machine that stitches a number of material domains collectively on the management and knowledge airplane boundary. It terminates inbound VXLAN tunnels from site-internal VTEPs, re-originates them towards distant websites utilizing its personal anycast Digital IP (VIP) handle, and masks the inner VTEP topology from the remainder of the community. Every BGW acts as an autonomous system boundary, utilizing eBGP between websites and iBGP inside a web site, which supplies you clear failure isolation and VTEP scale containment.
BGW implementation in Nexus One is predicated on RFC 9014 and the IETF multi-site EVPN draft (draft-sharma-bess-multi-site-evpn) that Cisco co-authored. ACI BGW implementation is the newest to adapt to those requirements.
BGW implementation is enhanced to assist the GPO customary. It understands the ESG format within the knowledge airplane and management airplane. It might translate between ESG tags because the packets go from one material to a different material. BGW may also implement coverage relying on the contracts outlined. The result’s that NX-OS materials, ACI, SONiC, and Nexus Hyperfabric–based mostly materials can seamlessly interconnect with constant coverage enforcement with out compromising the segmentation mannequin you could have invested in.
Mobility: Vital for workloads too
Probably the most operationally demanding challenges in hybrid multi-fabric infrastructure is shifting a dwell workload between materials by itself schedule. This relocation should happen seamlessly with out disrupting lively companies. This functionality requires that the vacation spot material current an similar Layer 2 area to the relocating workload, despite the fact that the bodily underlay connecting the 2 materials is a routed Layer 3 community.
That is the place the BGW structure pays direct operational dividends. With Nexus One, the workload experiences no IP handle change, no TCP session teardown, and no ARP decision delay when it strikes throughout heterogenous materials. The Layer 2 broadcast area follows it throughout the material boundary by means of the frequent EVPN management airplane, with the BGW dealing with tunnel re-origination transparently. As a result of Nexus One associates coverage with workload identification quite than with the bodily or digital port the workload is connected to, the coverage binding—together with any GPO-based segmentation guidelines—migrates with the workload robotically.
This distinctive functionality allows you to transfer workloads with higher flexibility, at a time of your selecting, quite than a pressured closing date imposed by infrastructure constraints.
What about ACI?
Nexus One encompasses and extends ACI. If you’re working ACI right this moment, you might be already working Nexus One. The improvements ACI pioneered have gotten open, standards-based capabilities that any Nexus One material can run. ACI is among the decisions described within the software program layer within the structure. Nexus One shouldn’t be a alternative for ACI; it embraces and enhances ACI. ACI will proceed to be supported as a part of Nexus One.
Nexus One advantages: Seamless, safe, scalable—but easy
Right here’s how Nexus One delivers on every of those 4 guarantees—seamless, safe, scalable, and easy.
- Seamless interoperability: For many of you, the information middle shouldn’t be a “rip and exchange” atmosphere. It’s a residing ecosystem constructed over years of deliberate funding. Nexus One is constructed for that actuality. It allows seamless interconnectivity and interoperability between totally different material architectures. You possibly can deploy VXLAN EVPN materials alongside ACI materials, with Layer 2 and Layer 3 stretches and coverage consistency throughout each. Whether or not you might be working a conventional enterprise software or a cloud-native software working in digital machines or Kubernetes deployments with Isovalent and Cilium, Nexus One gives a unified administration airplane and a constant expertise for full lifecycle administration. This implies you do not need to decide on between the automation of ACI and the flexibleness of NX-OS or SONiC. You possibly can have all the pieces managed by means of a single, cohesive structure.
- Safety at each layer: On this period of Mythos and AI-driven cyber threats, the imply time to use a vulnerability has dropped from days to hours and even to minutes. Defending high-value digital belongings within the knowledge middle is not only vital, it’s enterprise crucial. Nexus One expands group-based coverage throughout a number of materials utilizing ESG to implement microsegmentation in actual time and mitigate safety threats as they emerge. That segmentation can lengthen all the best way into Kubernetes clusters with Isovalent integration. Clients can take safety to the following degree after they implement Nexus One with Cisco N9300 Good Switches, which provide stateful microsegmentation enforced on the DPU constructed into Good Switches. And Cisco Dwell Defend, constructed into the inspiration of Nexus One, can present CVE shields with out having to patch the whole infrastructure throughout a vulnerability window or reload the switches. Safety is infused into each layer of Nexus One.
- Scale, on each ends of the spectrum: Once we take into consideration scale, we aren’t simply fascinated about large-scale knowledge facilities with tons of and 1000’s of switches; we’re additionally fascinated about small-scale knowledge facilities, edge knowledge facilities with tens of switches. Nexus One permits for constructing and working large-scale knowledge facilities and small-scale knowledge facilities in a constant and cost-effective means. Hyperfabric is a superb selection for patrons who function small-to-midsize knowledge facilities, edge knowledge facilities, and out-of-band administration networks, and who’ve embraced SaaS-based administration. Nexus Dashboard presents the on-premises choice, going all the best way as much as 1000 switches in a single cluster. On the decrease finish of the spectrum, prospects may also deploy Nexus Dashboard on a single node or a digital node to maintain it value efficient for smaller deployments.
- Easy to function: Networking is inherently complicated; operations don’t should be. As networks develop in measurement, the working mannequin must get easier. Nexus One working fashions concentrate on simplifying operations for operators. This method is identical whether or not you might be utilizing on-premises Nexus Dashboard Controller or the SaaS-based Nexus Hyperfabric Controller. It additionally holds true whether or not you’re a human consumer, an API consumer driving operations with community as code, or an AI agent driving agent operations. Simplicity and robustness sit on the core of each functionality we construct.
A dedication to our knowledge middle networking prospects
The transition to AI-ready infrastructure is a marathon, not a dash. It requires a accomplice who understands the complexities of your present atmosphere whereas sustaining a transparent imaginative and prescient for the place the {industry} is heading.
With Cisco Nexus One, we meet you the place you might be. We’re offering a future outlined by open requirements, safety, operational selection, and unparalleled scale. We’re prepared for what comes subsequent, and we’re constructing it with you and for you.
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