Information facilities have been evolving at an unprecedented tempo. Transformational developments like AI and safety are additional accelerating that evolution. Information middle networking varieties the inspiration for AI workloads, and it performs a crucial position in defending the high-value property from refined AI-driven cyberattacks.
At Cisco, we at all times meet our clients the place they’re. That’s the reason we’re evolving the info middle community structure, addressing the developments reshaping the setting proper now.
Meet Cisco Nexus One, our next-generation information middle networking structure.
To grasp Nexus One, we have to step again in time. After 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 clients approached the info middle. The {industry} wanted a method 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 strategy with Cisco Software Coverage Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to assist clients deal with explosive enterprise development. 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 information facilities, the necessity to defend towards AI-driven safety threats, and a transparent want for higher architectural flexibility have grow to be prime priorities. The following part of our information middle networking journey requires us to suppose larger, extra overtly, and flexibly with out compromising backward compatibility. That considering 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 the Web Engineering Activity Power (IETF).
By anchoring on the extensively 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 clients and companions an structure that’s open, extensible, and absolutely backward suitable 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 Reside 2026 Las Vegas, we introduced Cisco Cloud Management, our single, unified AgenticOps platform for managing all the 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 deliver the info middle networking portfolio underneath 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 information middle, your manner: Constructed on first ideas
To grasp how Nexus One modifications 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 information facilities are precisely alike.
- The silicon layer: basis of efficiency. We’re shifting past a hard and fast 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 provides you the flexibleness to decide on the {hardware} basis that most accurately fits your efficiency, energy, and workload necessities, whether or not you’re operating high-performance AI coaching clusters or AI inferencing, AI storage, CPU workloads, or out-of-band administration networks.
- The programs layer: the {hardware} anchor. Our flagship Cisco N9000 Collection Switches stay the {hardware} anchor of the structure. It continues to ship the high-performance, dependable {hardware} you’re accustomed to, now paired with essentially the most superior optics obtainable. Within the AI period, the bodily layer is simply as crucial because the software program layer, and we’re not compromising on both.
- The software program layer: working system selection. Nexus One helps Cisco ACI, NX-OS, and now SONiC. A lot of you have got developed specialised experience throughout totally different working programs, and we need to provide the flexibility to decide on the community working system that finest 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 deal with our clients’ evolving wants. To that extent, we not too long ago introduced that Cisco will assist SONiC as an choice for Cisco N9000 Collection Switches.
- The working mannequin: management and agility. We’ve expanded our administration choices to supply extra management and agility. You may 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 information middle networking. It simplifies community operations by a single, built-in management level. Nexus Dashboard offers unified visibility throughout your material, automates coverage enforcement, and streamlines day-2 operations. Nexus Dashboard will assist Nexus 9000 automation operating SONiC alongside Cisco NX-OS and Cisco ACI. The result’s higher flexibility, reliability, sooner troubleshooting, and decreased operational overhead, serving to IT infrastructure groups preserve stability and safety whereas controlling prices throughout complicated environments. | The latest addition to our portfolio, Nexus Hyperfabric delivers scalable, cloud-managed, full-stack material deployment and lifecycle automation for information middle infrastructure. It takes ease of use to the subsequent degree with progressive options comparable 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 strategy that permits clients 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 similar: simplifying day-0, day-1, and day-N operations with constant technical and enterprise outcomes.
The requirements beneath: Requirements to deliver 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 straight underpins the distributed coverage enforcement and material interoperability fashions central to this structure. With Nexus One, we need to supply the selection to clients to construct information middle materials which can be open requirements compliant.
To standardize the policy-based segmentation pioneered with ACI, we actively contributed to 3 key IETF drafts.
- draft-smith-vxlan-group-policy: defines how a Group Coverage ID is encoded as a flag and metadata discipline straight inside the VXLAN header
- draft-wlin-bess-group-policy-id-extended-community: introduces a BGP prolonged group to hold that Group Coverage ID by 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) commonplace—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 commonplace. Hyperfabric will observe swimsuit primarily based on the identical requirements. You may obtain constant microsegmentation and repair chaining outcomes together with your material of selection.
How will you prolong 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 may, 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 gadget that stitches a number of material domains collectively on the management and information airplane boundary. It terminates inbound VXLAN tunnels from site-internal VTEPs, re-originates them towards distant websites utilizing its personal anycast Digital IP (VIP) deal with, 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 provides you clear failure isolation and VTEP scale containment.
BGW implementation in Nexus One relies 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 commonplace. It understands the ESG format within the information airplane and management airplane. It could possibly translate between ESG tags because the packets go from one material to a different material. BGW can even implement coverage relying on the contracts outlined. The result’s that NX-OS materials, ACI, SONiC, and Nexus Hyperfabric–primarily based materials can seamlessly interconnect with constant coverage enforcement with out compromising the segmentation mannequin you have got invested in.
Mobility: Vital for workloads too
One of the 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 energetic providers. This functionality requires that the vacation spot material current an equivalent Layer 2 area to the relocating workload, regardless 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 deal with 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 the widespread EVPN management airplane, with the BGW dealing with tunnel re-origination transparently. As a result of Nexus One associates coverage with workload identification moderately than with the bodily or digital port the workload is hooked up to, the coverage binding—together with any GPO-based segmentation guidelines—migrates with the workload routinely.
This distinctive functionality allows you to transfer workloads with higher flexibility, at a time of your selecting, moderately than a pressured closing date imposed by infrastructure constraints.
What about ACI?
Nexus One encompasses and extends ACI. If you’re operating ACI as we speak, you might be already operating Nexus One. The improvements ACI pioneered have gotten open, standards-based capabilities that any Nexus One material can run. ACI is among the selections described within the software program layer within the structure. Nexus One is just not a substitute 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 info middle is just not a “rip and exchange” setting. 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 may 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 operating a standard enterprise utility or a cloud-native utility operating in digital machines or Kubernetes deployments with Isovalent and Cilium, Nexus One offers a unified administration airplane and a constant expertise for full lifecycle administration. This implies you would not have to decide on between the automation of ACI and the flexibleness of NX-OS or SONiC. You may have all the pieces managed by a single, cohesive structure.
- Safety at each layer: On this period of Mythos and AI-driven cyber threats, the imply time to take advantage of a vulnerability has dropped from days to hours and even to minutes. Defending high-value digital property within the information middle isn’t just essential, 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 prolong all the way in which into Kubernetes clusters with Isovalent integration. Clients can take safety to the subsequent degree after they implement Nexus One with Cisco N9300 Sensible Switches, which provide stateful microsegmentation enforced on the DPU constructed into Sensible Switches. And Cisco Reside Shield, constructed into the inspiration of Nexus One, can present CVE shields with out having to patch all the 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: After we take into consideration scale, we’re not simply desirous about large-scale information facilities with lots of and hundreds of switches; we’re additionally desirous about small-scale information facilities, edge information facilities with tens of switches. Nexus One permits for constructing and working large-scale information facilities and small-scale information facilities in a constant and cost-effective manner. Hyperfabric is a wonderful selection for purchasers who function small-to-midsize information facilities, edge information facilities, and out-of-band administration networks, and who’ve embraced SaaS-based administration. Nexus Dashboard presents the on-premises choice, going all the way in which as much as 1000 switches in a single cluster. On the decrease finish of the spectrum, clients can even deploy Nexus Dashboard on a single node or a digital node to maintain it price efficient for smaller deployments.
- Easy to function: Networking is inherently complicated; operations don’t need to be. As networks develop in measurement, the working mannequin must get easier. Nexus One working fashions concentrate on simplifying operations for operators. This strategy is similar 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 person, an API person 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 information middle networking clients
The transition to AI-ready infrastructure is a marathon, not a dash. It requires a accomplice who understands the complexities of your present setting 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.
Further assets:
