Cisco has allied with Nvidia and VAST Data to launch a Secure AI Factory – a bundle of servers, GPUs, and storage designed for enterprise AI.
These Secure AI Factories are, like Dell’s AI Factories – a form of converged infrastructure (CI) – uniting suppliers’ offerings in a single SKU for customer convenience. Cisco has been in the CI game for many years with EMC, VMware, and the original rack-scale Acadia VCE systems. Cisco has also built similar systems using NetApp storage, called FlexPods, and FlashStacks with Pure Storage. The template has always been to add third-party storage to Cisco UCS servers and its networking products to compete with Dell, HPE, IBM, and other server system suppliers. Now it is repeating the format with VAST Data storage.
Jeremy Foster, SVP and GM for Cisco Compute, stated: “Agentic AI has the potential to unlock the value of AI for enterprises around the world. Moving beyond chatbots to agents that can help solve true business challenges is revolutionary, but only if enterprises can effectively leverage the right data at the right times. Cisco, Nvidia, and VAST are working together to give customers a simple path to unlocking the value of their data.”
AI PODs are the infrastructure components inside Cisco’s Secure AI Factory concept.
The AI POD is a so-called atomic unit in the overall factory scheme:
Cisco’s UCS servers include Nvidia’s RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and are positioned for AI apps and agent use. The AI POD storage element can be made up from either NetApp, Pure Storage, or VAST Data products. There are a pair of deployment options: an available ready-to-deploy system with VAST Data storage, and a modular, build-your-own infrastructure variant with either NetApp, Pure Storage, or VAST Data storage.
VAST says the AI PODs are available with its InsightEngine, claiming that its AI OS software stack has more AI-relevant components than either NetApp or Pure Storage. Cisco’s Secure AI Factory blueprint, it says, “expands to new use cases, including the acceleration of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines with faster data extraction and retrieval.”
John Mao, VP of strategic alliances at VAST Data, said: “By integrating the VAST Data InsightEngine into the Cisco Secure AI Factory with Nvidia, we’re giving enterprises the first integrated design for RAG acceleration at scale.”
VAST says it will be the first vendor to integrate with Cisco AI PODs and offer enterprise customers an Nvidia AI Data Platform reference design. We’re told customers will get faster request answer times by reducing RAG pipeline latency from minutes to seconds for near-real-time AI responses. They should also get “agentic AI at enterprise scale by enabling AI agents to operate continuously, learn dynamically and deliver contextualized business outcomes.” The setup “unlocks multi-step reasoning, and the architecture is designed for scale by supporting multiple agents and workloads simultaneously.”
The VAST AI PODs feature role-based access control and compliance and audit readiness, and are “the first in a series of AI services PODs built to support the growing number of use cases in the enterprise.”
Cisco AI PODs with VAST InsightEngine are available from Cisco now.
