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ai networking

A collection of 3 posts

Skipping the Steak Dinner

Skipping the Steak Dinner

Last week in Amsterdam, the producers asked me to talk about Cisco and AI on live television. I could have repeated the slogan. Instead, I skipped dinner to translate "Cisco is the critical infrastructure for the AI era" into something practitioners could actually use.

Why AI Networks Fail (Even With Enough Bandwidth)

Why AI Networks Fail (Even With Enough Bandwidth)

Networking Field Day 39 challenged my assumptions about AI infrastructure. The real problems? Traffic imbalance, not capacity. ROCE's sensitivity to packet loss. Why validated designs matter more than specs. Here's what finally clicked for me about why AI networks fail—even with enough bandwidth.

Silicon One: Why Cisco's Ethernet Bet Might Be the Smartest Play Nobody's Talking About

Silicon One: Why Cisco's Ethernet Bet Might Be the Smartest Play Nobody's Talking About

Cisco's Silicon One follows a proven playbook: make Ethernet "good enough," win on operational simplicity. InfiniBand leads AI training, but if workloads fragment toward inference/edge, Cisco's positioned for the larger market. Amsterdam 2026 will show if the pattern holds.