Cisco Unveils New Nexus Switches With Embedded Hypershield For Data Center Security In The Age Of AI

'If you think about what's on the minds of our customers, [they] are looking at AI massively transforming everything they do in the data center. The data center is a huge topic of conversation again. Everybody's looking at how they can refresh their data center,' Cisco's SVP and GM of Cisco networking, data center and provider connectivity, told CRN ahead of Cisco Live EMEA 2025.

Cisco Systems has introduced a new Nexus 9300 series of smart switches with embedded data processing units and is offering Hypershield, the company's AI-powered security architecture for data center protection, as a service embedded on the new switches, the tech giant unveiled at Cisco Live EMEA 2025 on Tuesday.

The latest announcements come as many enterprises refresh their traditional data center environments to prepare for AI, which is demanding increased power, compute, and networking, Kevin Wollenweber, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco networking, data center and provider connectivity, told CRN ahead of Cisco Live EMEA.

"If you think about what’s on the minds of our customers, [they] are looking at AI massively transforming everything they do in the data center,” said Wollenweber (pictured). “The data center is a huge topic of conversation again. Everybody’s looking at how they can refresh their data center."

The latest 9300 series smart switches powered by programmable AMD data processing units (DPUs) can be deployed as regular switches or with advanced features. Services can by embedded directly into the switch series as customers need to scale up or adapt to their changing IT needs, without adding more hardware, Wollenweber said.

"Think of it as a switch that can do service acceleration. Certain things that normally couldn't be done in an ASIC or in a [neural processing unit] NPU, we've added some technology to the switch that allows us to accelerate services, and so you can think of it as being able to process more than just the forwarding of packets, like a lot of our switches did before," he said.

DPUs, as opposed to NPUs, are a little more programmable and flexible, Wollenweber said. If administrators don’t turn on any accelerated services, the new switch series can act as a traditional top of rack switch.

The first integrated service on the new Nexus Smart Switch series is Hypershield. Cisco’s Hypershield technology comes from the company's 2024 acquisition of Isovalent, a provider of open source, cloud-native networking and security. Cisco at the time said that Isovalent’s technologies would become “a cornerstone” of the Cisco Security Cloud strategy and today, Hypershield enhances network security through micro-segmentation and policy enforcement across the infrastructure.

With Cisco Hypershield offered as the first service embedded on the new switches, customers will have access to an advanced, AI-native, distributed security architecture built directly into their data center fabrics, the company said.

“Instead of applying the policies at the server, we can move that security functionality into the network. We think that’s really powerful because it allows you to have micro-segmentation and policy implementation anywhere you want, and actually fused into the network itself,” Wollenweber said.

The combination also helps in closing the gap between the security and networking layers because administrators can automatically update security policies across their entire infrastructure from a single offering, Wollenweber said. This will help enterprises keep their security environments up to date with minimal manual effort, he added.

End users can manage their security policies in the cloud or on premise through the Nexus dashboard.

The Nexus 9300 24-port 100G model, which is designed to be placed at the edge of the data center as a cloud "on-ramp," will be generally available this spring. The 48-port 25G, 6-port 400G, and 2-port 100G models will be generally available this summer, according to San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco.

Networking, Security As One

Cisco continues to bridge the gap between networking and security by way of leadership changes announced last year. In August, Jeetu Patel, formerly Cisco's executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration, was promoted to chief product officer and is responsible for both Cisco's core networking and security businesses. Reporting to him is Tom Gillis, Cisco's senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Security, Data Center, Internet and Cloud Infrastructure Group as of December. Gillis was previously responsible for Cisco's Security Business Group.

The significant changes in Cisco's product strategy and bringing data center networking and compute, and the company's hyperscaler business under Gillis and the security organization shows that Cisco is bringing together all the components needed for data center buildouts, whether for service providers or enterprises, Wollenweber said.

The latest Nexus smart switches are the result of Cisco's security and networking organizations uniting under Patel, he added.