Cisco introduced switches with AMD Pensando digital processing units Tuesday that run security and network services on the devices instead of on separate appliances.
The Cisco N9300 series of Smart Switches is powered by the Cisco Silicon One E100 network processor, designed for top-of-rack switching. The chip provides 4.8 Tbps of capacity, advanced telemetry, line-rate encryption and integration with AMD DPUs.
Cisco is not the first vendor to introduce data center switches with DPUs. In 2021, Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduced the Aruba Networking CX 10000 series with a Pensando processor for networking and security services, including firewalls, encryption and load balancing.
AMD acquired Pensando for $1.9 billion a year later. At the time, Pensando made a programmable packet processor that competed with DPUs from Intel and Nvidia.
Cisco waited for customer demand to build before releasing a switch with DPU for enterprises.
“DPU acceleration in data center switching is still in its early stages, with use cases continuing to evolve,” the company said in an emailed statement. “Cisco takes a deliberate approach to innovation — ensuring we deliver solutions that truly address customer needs at the right time.”
The Cisco Smart Switch will initially run Cisco’s Hypershield, a distributed security architecture leveraging DPUs and the extended Berkeley Packet Filter. EBPF is a Linux kernel technology that executes programs in a sandbox separate from the OS.
Hypershield automatically analyzes large amounts of security data to make recommendations and provide general insights. It also provides visibility into application processes.
“Every port on a network of Smart Switches becomes a network security enforcement point,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. “This leads to more efficiency in traffic flow, which is critical to latency-sensitive applications like AI.”
Preparing for AI
The Smart Switch is a logical option for enterprises refreshing their networks to run AI models and applications. While the hardware isn’t AI-specific, it would route traffic from AI applications running on clusters of GPUs. Organizations doing large-scale AI today include financial institutions, large pharmaceuticals and cloud providers.
“The thing we’re hearing is that AI is having a big impact on all networking infrastructure — data center and edge, ” said Jim Frey, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia. “Everyone’s really looking at this and saying, ‘How can I prepare for AI?’”
Cloud providers and organizations with hyperscale data centers have run network and security services on DPUs attached to switches for years. Cisco offers the 8000 series of white-box switches to select customers who want to run the SONiC open source network OS on a Silicon One processor. Microsoft developed SONiC, or Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, for hyperscale data centers.
“Cisco has taken what they’ve learned from selling Silicon One to hyperscalers and has figured out how to package it for non-hyperscalers — for everybody else,” Frey said.
The Smart Switches run Cisco’s NX-OS and are managed through the Nexus Dashboard, a unified platform for managing, monitoring and operating data center networks. Integrated services include lifecyle device management and policy orchestration.
Cisco could run various network and security services on the DPUs in the future, including network address translation, IPsec encryption, application load balancing, event-based telemetry and DDoS protection, the company said. Also, Cisco could allow select customers in vertical industries to run custom-built services on the DPUs.
Cisco plans to ship its first available N9300 Smart Switch in the spring. It will feature 24 100G ports. A model featuring 48 25G ports, two 100G ports and six 400G ports is scheduled for release in the summer. Pricing was not disclosed.
Antone Gonsalves is an editor at large for Informa TechTarget, reporting on industry trends critical to enterprise tech buyers. He has worked in tech journalism for 25 years and is based in San Francisco. Have a news tip? Please drop him an email.
