The greatest breakthroughs are often the ones that make the impossible simple. With the rapid speed of AI innovation, Cisco recognized it was time to deliver that breakthrough. Learn how Cisco IT deployed Nexus Hyperfabric as customer zero to help design, deploy, and manage AI infrastructure with more speed and simplicity than ever before.
AI simplification on the horizon
After more than 27 years working in data centers, I’ve seen firsthand how much of a headache it can be to design, build, and manage AI infrastructure — whether you’re supporting core business applications or standing up the next wave of AI workloads. It takes a monumental investment of capital, effort, time, and resources to make it work — a massive balancing act. Once it’s up and running, it’s complex to operate, scale, and derive value from. Every day of delay comes at a huge cost, from wasted GPU lifespan to utility costs to opportunity costs.
In my role, speed and simplification to the AI infrastructure build process would completely transform how I’m able to do my job. Ultimately, speed and simplicity are the key to lessening the weight of these costs and unlocking the maximum value of AI.
In mid-2025, Cisco leadership tasked my team and I with building an AI cluster that could support our internal AI assistant — a powerful tool that has increased employee productivity by 73%. Throughout the summer of 2025, our product and IT teams came together to make that happen at our facility in Allen, TX. We set out to build this AI cluster in record time, hoping to match the unprecedented speed of AI innovation.
Luckily, Cisco had already been working on a solution that could transform this process, and this presented a golden opportunity to step in as Customer Zero. Enter Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric — Cisco’s new full stack AI infrastructure solution.
Simplicity as Customer Zero
Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric is a cloud-managed network fabric as a service that enables organizations to easily design, deploy, manage, and scale multiple fabrics globally with minimal expertise. It’s the ultimate tool for network engineers — even those with little-to-no expertise in building and managing AI fabrics. It offers a vertically integrated approach that unifies on-premise network, compute, GPUs, and storage.
We started with a blank slate. After selecting a present template and inputting our desired specs (like cluster size, hardware, etc.), Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric gave us a comprehensive blueprint for our new AI fabric—with every port, cable, server, and switch mapped in detail to maximize performance and efficiency. All done in an instant.
But this isn’t just a design tool. Once we validated the design, Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric’s integration with our ordering tools allowed us to generate a bill of materials based on the blueprint, and order everything we needed—all the GPUs, servers, and cabling—with the press of a button.
Shortly thereafter, our materials arrived in Texas and we fully built and configured the. network in just six days. Processes that used to take as long as six months took just days. It became clear: The era of simplified network engineering was upon us.
A new normal: Accessible management for the AI era
With Nexus Hyperfabric, Day 0 and Day 1 operations were completely transformed for us. It also raises the bar for Day 2 network operations. With its networking controller component, Nexus Hyperfabric delivers a technological shift in the way we monitor and manage our fabric, yielding faster, more prescriptive remediation,and making it easier for us to keep fabrics online and stable.
The system presents problems to us in messages like: “this cable has been pulled” or “this server‑to‑switch link is down.” This helps us zero in on the cause of the problem instantly instead of spending hours troubleshooting. When it comes to our ability to keep our AI infrastructure running and maximize ROI, this is an absolute game changer.
This is all possible because Nexus Hyperfabric doesn’t use typical protocols like syslog or Simple Network Management (SNMP); instead, it pioneers a new protocol that verifies network status against the blueprint. This approach enables even those without deep network engineering expertise to be able to keep our fabric resilient, even in the most demanding environments.
With our fabric in Allen, anyone in our IT organization can troubleshoot when problems arise, not just experienced network engineers. This level of accessibility delivers resilience that has never before been possible, allowing our applications to stay resilient and our employees to stay productive.
The convergence of simplicity and speed
For Cisco IT, Nexus Hyperfabric solves several of the key problems that have historically hindered our ability to build and manage AI infrastructure with speed and efficiency:
- Speed to deploy: Nexus Hyperfabric transformed our AI cluster deployment time from six months to just six days. By automating design, generating optimized blueprints, and integrating with ordering systems, it enabled rapid build-out and configuration. This maximized our infrastructure lifespan, ROI, and time-to-value.
- Simplicity in deployment and management: Nexus Hyperfabric makes AI fabric deployment and management accessible for IT generalists, not just network engineers. Its cloud-managed design guides non-experts through deployment and operations, and blueprint-based monitoring provides clear, actionable insights. This empowers IT generalists to maintain resilient fabrics without deep networking expertise.
Compounding advantages
As powerful as these outcomes are, the real power is unlocked when it all comes together: the accessibility of Nexus Hyperfabric and the power of Cisco’s 6000 Series switches, UCS servers, Silicon One, and optics. When they all come together, they enable us to deliver AI infrastructure that delivers more meaningful value to our customers and employees, more quickly than ever before.
For businesses looking to build AI infrastructure that solves real problems quickly and at scale, Nexus Hyperfabric can be the difference between successful and unsuccessful builds.
While we look to the past for inspiration, it’s clear that the future of AI infrastructure will be defined by how simply, quickly, and effectively it can be built and managed. Cisco Nexus Hyperfabric has been the ultimate tool in helping us accomplish this.
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