Today's enterprise data centers are evolving rapidly, driven by changing business needs, complex applications, and growing user demands. As organizations embrace hybrid strategies for flexibility and cost savings, workloads are moving beyond traditional environments. While this transformation enables scalability, it also introduces new security and operational challenges, requiring a new approach to protecting critical applications and infrastructure.

According to Gartner:?Increased cyberthreats, such as ransomware attacks targeting critical infrastructure, can cripple data center operations. This can disrupt service, cause financial losses, and affect national security. Such events might prompt regulations requiring stronger cybersecurity measures, vulnerability assessments, and incident-reporting protocols for data centers.?

Modern data centers operate across private clouds, public clouds, and colocation environments, creating complex, distributed ecosystems. Disparate solutions with service-specific devices and dashboards increases the risk of error, inconsistent enforcement, and security breaches. At the same time, agility and cost optimization remain critical for seamless application scaling.

Solution: Where security meets the network

As data centers evolve, so must the infrastructure that powers them. To meet growing demands for scalability, security, and efficiency, we are excited to introduce the Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switches-a new family of data center switches featuring programmable data processing units (DPUs) that can embed stateful services directly into the data center fabric at scale and speed for greater simplicity, increased service throughput, and cost efficiency.

Built-in power of Cisco Silicon One and DPUs

By integrating DPUs into the new switches, we are transforming data center networking platforms into high-capacity, multifunctional, service-hosting devices. The DPUs can efficiently handle complex data processing tasks and deliver advanced services beyond traditional networking functions.

Powered by the Cisco Silicon One E100 ASIC, Cisco Smart Switches offer high speed connectivity, rich telemetry, line-rate encryption and power efficiency for modern data center workloads. With the AMD DPUs, these Smart Switches provide 800G service throughput. The DPU acceleration unlocks a diverse set of network and security services such as stateful segmentation, large-scale NAT, IPsec encryption, IDS/IPS, event-based telemetry, DDoS protection. The first stateful service supported on the switch will be Layer-4 stateful segmentation* with Cisco Hypershield.

Intelligent traffic redirection from the switching ASIC to the DPU considerably reduces the latency compared to traditional infrastructure. The architectural shift also drives substantial cost savings through hardware consolidation, reduced power consumption and rack space usage and operational simplicity.

The first Smart Switch N9324C is a 24-port, 100G switch with 800G service throughput and the N9348Y2C6D is a 48-port 25G, 2-port 100G and 6-port 400G with 800G service throughput (see Figure 1).

Integrated security with Cisco Hypershield and Operating Model

The new Cisco Smart Switches integrate Cisco Hypershield, an AI-native security architecture that enables stateful segmentation across the data center (see Figure 2). Cisco Security Cloud Control handles security policy creation and deployment, allowing SecOps teams to write, test, and orchestrate policies across networks, workloads, and cloud environments.

In addition, Cisco Nexus Dashboard will continue to manage the operational aspects of the switch, DPU, and network policies-providing NetOps teams with dedicated workflows tailored to their roles and responsibilities.

Nexus Dashboard and Cisco Security Cloud Control also provide cross-platform visibility to simplify data center operations and enable collaboration between network and security teams. These two platforms work in tandem create a cohesive, agile, and scalable data center infrastructure, ready to support the evolving demands of modern applications and security challenges.

Key Advantages of Cisco Hypershield on Smart Switches

The integration of Hypershield into these new switches creates many advantages, such as:

• Autonomous segmentation policies: Hypershield uses AI to dynamically refine security policies based on application identity and behavior. It automates policy creation, optimization, and enforcement across workloads and Smart Switches, ensuring seamless, adaptive security with minimal manual effort.
• Up-to-date security posture without the risk of disruption: Hypershield has the ability to self-qualify updates with digital twin technology to reduce risk with policy updates, ensure a faster up-to-date security posture and drive policy lifecycle management at scale. By testing segmentation policy changes in the production environment, Hypershield validates them, establishes trust, and generates confidence in its AI-recommended policies.
• Persona-driven operational models: Hypershield enables distributed security enforcement while maintaining separate workflows for NetOps and SecOps. Nexus Dashboard and Security Cloud Control provide integrated visibility, making troubleshooting and compliance management seamless.
• Optimal routing with inline security: By leveraging Smart Switches, network infrastructure can be simplified while ensuring optimal routing and robust protection.
• Consistent policy enforcement across multiple domains: Hypershield streamlines security policy management through Cisco Security Cloud Control, which allows policies to be managed across a library of enforcement points within Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall solution, including across cloud workloads, Smart Switches, and next-gen firewalls.

Using Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switches

As modern data centers evolve, security must be embedded directly into the network fabric to ensure seamless, scalable protection. Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switches, powered by Hypershield, enable secure connectivity across security zones, fabrics, and hybrid cloud environments. With built-in layer-4 firewalling, these switches simplify security enforcement while reducing architectural complexity, making network operations more efficient and scalable (see Figure 3).

• Secure cloud edge: Traditional firewalls in the DMZ create bottlenecks and single points of failure, limiting cloud edge scalability. Cisco Smart Switches integrate networking and security in a single solution, streamlining hybrid cloud connectivity, reducing latency and costs, and enabling a scalable, resilient architecture.
• Zone-based segmentation: Cisco Smart Switches with Hypershield replace costly, complex firewalls with automated, consistent security policies across network zones, ensuring seamless protection without added complexity.
• Secure Data center interconnect (DCI): By converging border gateways and Layer-4 firewalls, Cisco Smart Switches reduce costs, enhance efficiency, and enforce consistent security policies across interconnected data centers.
• Top-of-rack (ToR) with stateful segmentation: As Top-of-Rack switches, Cisco Smart Switches provide distributed stateful segmentation and Layer-4 security on every port. Traffic is seamlessly redirected from the switching ASIC to the DPU, ensuring high-performance, scalable security enforcement within the network fabric.

Across all use cases, Cisco Nexus Dashboard and Security Cloud Control provide unified visibility into network and security operations. With lossless high availability, seamless state failover, and pre-deployment policy testing, organizations can enhance security, minimize disruptions, and ensure consistent enforcement at scale.

Cisco provides flexible deployment options for both greenfield and brownfield environments. Customers can deploy Smart Switches first and enable Hypershield later after qualification, or implement both simultaneously for a seamless transition to a highly autonomous, secure data center infrastructure.

Revolutionizing Data Center Security with Platform Integration

Cisco Smart Switches are revolutionizing data center security by embedding AI-driven, hardware-accelerated security directly into the network fabric. This seamless integration simplifies operations, enhances performance, and provides scalable, automated protection without the complexity of traditional security models. By leveraging intelligent automation and deep platform integration, Cisco Smart Switches delivers a cost-effective, high-performance solution for data centers secure, agile, and future ready.

Discover how to turn your data center into a high-performance data fortress-visit the Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switch page.

We will be showcasing our new service-accelerated solutions at Cisco Live in Amsterdam (February 11-14). Come and learn more at the event.

* Layer-4 zone-based segmentation capabilities are with appropriate licensing and will be available soon.

Visit the Cisco N9300 Series Smart Switch page