Information facilities have been evolving at an unprecedented tempo. Transformational developments like AI and safety are additional accelerating that evolution. Information heart networking types the muse for AI workloads, and it performs a crucial position in defending the high-value belongings 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 information heart community structure, addressing the developments reshaping the surroundings proper now.
Meet Cisco Nexus One, our next-generation knowledge heart networking structure.
To grasp Nexus One, we have to step again in time. After we launched Cisco Utility Centric Infrastructure (ACI) again in 2014, we weren’t simply releasing a brand new structure. We have been basically altering how clients approached the information heart. The {industry} wanted a strategy 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 Utility Coverage Infrastructure Controller (APIC) to assist clients handle explosive enterprise development. It has been a exceptional journey. Greater than 13,000 organizations depend on ACI to energy their most important workloads.
Now, take 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 want for better architectural flexibility have change into prime priorities. The following section of our knowledge heart 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 via the Web Engineering Process Drive (IETF).
By anchoring on the extensively deployed VXLAN EVPN expertise as our baseline, we’re guaranteeing 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 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 Stay 2026 Las Vegas, we introduced Cisco Cloud Management, our single, unified AgenticOps platform for managing your complete Cisco product portfolio—by each people and AI brokers. AI Canvas in Cisco Cloud Management is a stay, interactive workspace, generated dynamically by stay AI brokers to give attention to the problems at hand.
Nexus One integrates into Cisco Cloud Management to convey the information heart 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 situation decision.
Your knowledge heart, your manner: Constructed on first ideas
To grasp how Nexus One adjustments the sport, allow us to take a look at the 4 layers of the networking stack. We’ve designed Nexus One to offer flexibility at each layer, as a result of no two knowledge facilities are precisely alike.
The silicon layer: basis of efficiency. We’re transferring past a set path to help a broader vary of silicon choices. Nexus One helps Cisco Cloud Scale, Cisco Silicon One, and NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet change 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 methods 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 out there. 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’ve developed specialised experience throughout totally different working methods, and we need to provide the flexibility to decide on the community working system that finest aligns along 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 clients’ evolving wants. To that extent, we lately introduced that Cisco will help SONiC as an possibility for Cisco N9000 Collection Switches.
The working mannequin: management and agility. We’ve expanded our administration choices to offer 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 knowledge heart networking. It simplifies community operations via a single, built-in management level. Nexus Dashboard gives unified visibility throughout your cloth, automates coverage enforcement, and streamlines day-2 operations. Nexus Dashboard will help Nexus 9000 automation working SONiC alongside Cisco NX-OS and Cisco ACI. The result’s better flexibility, reliability, sooner troubleshooting, and lowered operational overhead, serving to IT infrastructure groups keep stability and safety whereas controlling prices throughout advanced environments.
The latest addition to our portfolio, Nexus Hyperfabric delivers scalable, cloud-managed, full-stack cloth deployment and lifecycle automation for knowledge heart infrastructure. It takes ease of use to the following stage with revolutionary options equivalent 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 help 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 purpose is identical: simplifying day-0, day-1, and day-N operations with constant technical and enterprise outcomes.
The requirements beneath: Requirements to convey the ACI coverage mannequin into VXLAN EVPN
The true-world operational worth of Nexus One is inseparable from the requirements that govern how materials talk, change state, and implement coverage. The IETF has been advancing a physique of labor that immediately underpins the distributed coverage enforcement and cloth interoperability fashions central to this structure. With Nexus One, we need to provide the selection to clients to construct knowledge heart 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 immediately inside the VXLAN header
draft-wlin-bess-group-policy-id-extended-community: introduces a BGP prolonged group to hold that Group Coverage ID via 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) normal—a direct, open-standards evolution of ACI’s ESG segmentation mannequin into native VXLAN EVPN materials.
NX-OS has carried out ESG and the related contracts for microsegmentation and repair chaining utilizing the GPO normal. Hyperfabric will comply with go well with based mostly on the identical requirements. You may obtain constant microsegmentation and repair chaining outcomes along with your cloth of selection.
How are you going to prolong the notion of coverage throughout materials? Are you able to arrange contracts between ESGs residing in two totally different cloth sorts (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 system that stitches a number of cloth 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 provides 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 most recent to adapt to those requirements.
BGW implementation is enhanced to help the GPO normal. It understands the ESG format within the knowledge airplane and management airplane. It will probably translate between ESG tags because the packets go from one cloth to a different cloth. BGW may 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’ve invested in.
Mobility: Vital for workloads too
One of the crucial operationally demanding challenges in hybrid multi-fabric infrastructure is transferring a stay workload between materials by itself schedule. This relocation should happen seamlessly with out disrupting energetic providers. This functionality requires that the vacation spot cloth current an similar Layer 2 area to the relocating workload, although 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 via the widespread EVPN management airplane, with the BGW dealing with tunnel re-origination transparently. As a result of Nexus One associates coverage with workload id somewhat 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 routinely.
This distinctive functionality helps you to transfer workloads with better flexibility, at a time of your selecting, somewhat than a compelled deadline imposed by infrastructure constraints.
What about ACI?
Nexus One encompasses and extends ACI. In case you are working ACI as we speak, you might be already working Nexus One. The improvements ACI pioneered have gotten open, standards-based capabilities that any Nexus One cloth can run. ACI is among the decisions 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 information heart is just not a “rip and exchange” surroundings. It’s a dwelling ecosystem constructed over years of deliberate funding. Nexus One is constructed for that actuality. It permits seamless interconnectivity and interoperability between totally different cloth 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 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 wouldn’t have to decide on between the automation of ACI and the flexibleness of NX-OS or SONiC. You may have all the pieces managed via 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 belongings within the knowledge heart is not only 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. Prospects can take safety to the following stage once they implement Nexus One with Cisco N9300 Sensible Switches, which provide stateful microsegmentation enforced on the DPU constructed into Sensible Switches. And Cisco Stay Shield, constructed into the muse of Nexus One, can present CVE shields with out having to patch your complete 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 aren’t simply fascinated by large-scale knowledge facilities with lots of and 1000’s of switches; we’re additionally fascinated by 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 manner. Hyperfabric is a superb selection for purchasers 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 provides the on-premises possibility, going all the way in which as much as 1000 switches in a single cluster. On the decrease finish of the spectrum, clients may 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 advanced; operations don’t need to be. As networks develop in measurement, the working mannequin must get less complicated. Nexus One working fashions give attention to simplifying operations for operators. This strategy 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 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 knowledge heart 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 surroundings 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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