Cisco Smart N9300 Ethernet Switch

The Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switches transform data-center networking and security by integrating Data Processing Units (DPUs) alongside networking ASICs in a compact form factor. These switches integrate advanced features such as stateful segmentation, and other services with core networking functions, promoting scalable, sustainable, and secure data-center operations. This ensures optimal performance and robust security for next-generation infrastructures while also lowering the total cost of ownership.

Enterprise data-center challenges

Today's enterprise data centers are facing a multitude of challenges stemming from constantly changing business needs, complex applications, and evolving user expectations. Enterprise data-center teams are increasingly adopting complex hybrid-cloud strategies to meet the changing demands of their businesses and applications. This makes it extremely challenging to secure their critical applications and infrastructure.

The adoption of multi-cloud models and complex application policies forces data-center infrastructure teams to manage security with a fragmented set of tools, including agents, probes, and physical and virtual firewalls. This complex environment makes it prone to errors and opens doors to security breaches. Existing physical firewall appliances are limited in capacity and are not scalable, creating bottlenecks for security as traffic grows. Furthermore, disparate tools hinder SecOps teams' ability to have a unified view of their data-center policies, limiting their access to telemetry and actionable insights, which slows incident response and impacts business continuity. Rising government regulations and the critical need to protect sensitive customer data amid ongoing threats make segmentation an urgent priority.

Solution: Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switches

Modern data centers require a hardware and software solution that offers the flexibility and agility of software-based solutions while ensuring the robustness of physical services appliances. These hyper-distributed data centers need a solution that natively integrates networking and security and other services, is simple and cost-effective to deploy and can automate policy creation and management at scale to ensure uptime and advanced protection at scale.

Data center switches with P4 programmable ASICs and integrated DPUs provide the optimal solution, by bringing the best-in-class hardware acceleration and the flexibility of software-based solutions. By offloading services tasks such as layer-4 segmentation, policy enforcement as well as compute intensive networking services to the data processing units, these switches enable faster threat detection and enhanced network efficiency. Unlike traditional firewalls, the distributed security architecture of these switches provides scalable, distributed policy enforcement across workloads and network nodes. Advanced telemetry and management tools simplify operations while enabling real-time monitoring and actionable insights, making them essential for addressing the complexity and scalability needs of modern data centers.