This is the week of Cisco Live EMEA, which is expected to attract more than 16,000 attendees to the beautiful city of Amsterdam. While there’s a lot to do in this great city, there will be plenty to keep our audiences interested, including the latest on key topics such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), automated IT operations, hybrid and multicloud management, sustainability, and many others.
Our goal for the conference is to empower our customers with knowledge and skills to reinforce how IT can drive business outcomes while maintaining a relentless pursuit on delivering the best possible experiences for their own customers, employees, partners, and other stakeholders.
Foremost, Cisco Live is an innovation showcase, and as always, we plan to show many compelling products, solutions, and services built by Cisco Compute and our technology partners. Here’s a summary of some of the newest innovations that we’re introducing this week to advance our vision for Cisco Networking Cloud and deliver security, simplification, and scalability to navigate today’s technological complexity:
New validated designs for AI with ecosystem partners
There is no question that the acceleration of AI is fundamentally changing our world and creating new growth opportunities for companies of all sizes, but it’s also true that many of these companies are also looking for solutions to operate, secure, and scale their computing and network infrastructure and operations to support highly diverse AI applications and use cases. Finding these solutions asks IT teams to traverse uncharted territory, a daunting proposition indeed.
We can help with the newest Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) built with ecosystem partners like Pure Storage, NetApp, and Red Hat, which will largely take the guesswork out of deploying infrastructure for AI.
This includes our newest CVDs for FlexPod and FlashStack for generative AI inferencing with NVIDIA AI Enterprise (NVAIe), which will help IT teams navigate, streamline, and integrate AI infrastructure into mainstream operations with playbooks to automate common AI models. These new CVDs leverage both the data center networking blueprint for high-performance AI/ML network fabrics as well as our highly modular compute architecture to build fully integrated Cisco solutions for operational simplicity and more resilient and sustainable AI-centric data center environments.
UCS X-Series Direct
Another IT reality today is that more and more computing resources have shifted from centralized data centers and clouds to devices at the edge. In response, Cisco is building edge computing devices to support modern applications that do not compromise the ability to process more efficiently focused high-performance processing at scale. With Cisco UCS X-Series Direct powered by Cisco Intersight, customers can support more applications at the edge with a smaller, more sustainable footprint complemented by secure and unified connectivity. This solution will be ideal for heavy edge use cases in manufacturing, healthcare, and small data centers.
With its simplified architecture that integrates server and fabric interconnects into a single chassis, Cisco UCS X-Series Direct provides support for a range of workloads, from online transaction processing, hyperconverged infrastructure, and AI inferencing, just to name a few.
Designed to accommodate the high bandwidth demands that modern AI architectures require for high-density GPU-to-GPU connectivity, we are providing 1.6 Tbps of low-latency Ethernet bandwidth per chassis. This means our customers get more than enough I/O to future-proof for AI workloads.
UCS C245 M8
Within data center environments, the reality is that data-intensive applications are becoming the norm, requiring extra performance and processing over traditional apps. To meet this need, we are introducing the Cisco UCS C245 M8 Rack Server with AMD EPYC™ 4th Generation processors, which provides a unique combination of performance, sustainability, and efficiency. This new offering will allow our customers to run any workload at scale and optimize the value of their IT infrastructure as they transition to next-generation technologies to take on a versatile range of storage and I/O-intensive applications, such as big data analytics, databases, collaboration, virtualization, and AI/ML.
Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud
Consumption-based IT infrastructure delivered as-a-service is an increasingly popular option to simplify operations, keep costs in check, and accelerate the time to value for the latest technologies available in the marketplace. The new managed services offering from Hitachi Vantara and powered by Cisco Compute solutions is designed to help customers accelerate their transition to hybrid and multicloud while mitigating risks through contractually agreed-to service levels, metrics, and consumption-based pricing. Specifically, customers benefit from improved data availability, enhanced hybrid cloud observability, better operational and infrastructure efficiency, and the enablement of hybrid cloud automation.
Customer success at ClusterPower
One of the best things about Cisco Live is that customers can meet and exchange or share knowledge with their peers. One customer to look for this week is ClusterPower, a superuser of Cisco UCS platforms that manages all of its servers, applications, and client environments with Cisco Intersight. As a business, ClusterPower provides compute infrastructure and AI resources and services to a variety of industries throughout Central and Eastern Europe. ClusterPower also has a compelling sustainability story that includes building its own microgrid to produce energy from gas and hydrogen for powering state-of-the-art digital solutions and services and supporting their clients’ most critical workloads.
ClusterPower will share more details of this impressive computing and sustainability success story as part of Innovation Talk, taking place on Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2024. (“Accelerating Your Journey to Net Zero with Cisco Solutions – INTGRN-1008”). You can learn more about ClusterPower in our case study.
You can get more detailed Cisco Compute and data center product
and solution information at Cisco Live in the following areas.
Compute Product & Strategy Overviews
Compute Technical sessions
World of Solutions
thank you for highlighting our joint Cisco powered service – I like it. #GoManaged