How to get AI insights from your backed up on-prem data

As enterprise leaders race to harness the power of artificial intelligence, many are hitting the same roadblocks: siloed data, complex infrastructure, and ever-present concerns about security and compliance. While generative AI (Gen AI) holds enormous promise for delivering business insights, most organizations struggle to make their own data AI-ready in a secure and governed manner. The need for a turnkey, integrated, and resilient solution has never been more pressing.

You can now extract business insights from your on-premises enterprise data with the combined power of Cisco AI Pod, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, Cohesity DataProtect, and Cohesity Gaia. This integrated solution brings together best-in-class hardware, software, and data protection technologies to unlock actionable business value from backup and unstructured data, all with enterprise-grade security and governance.

• Cisco AI Pod: A modular, GPU-powered compute platform built on Cisco UCS and Nexus networking, pre-validated for AI workloads and automated by Cisco Intersight.
• NVIDIA AI Enterprise: Industry-leading software for AI development, training, and inference—optimized for enterprise scalability, reliability, and support.
• Cohesity DataProtect: Comprehensive data protection and cyber resilience, capturing and securing enterprise data across environments.
• Cohesity Gaia: A secure data foundation and Gen AI engine, extracting insights from backup data with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, and policy-driven access controls.

Together, these technologies form a turnkey AI solution that helps transform protected data into a powerful engine for innovation and productivity—delivering insights quickly, with governance and security at its core.

Solving top AI challenges: Security and simplicity

Deploying enterprise AI is about much more than just spinning up a GPU cluster. Three persistent challenges stand in the way of success—and the Cisco-NVIDIA-Cohesity stack is purpose-built to address them:

1. Data fragmentation: Most intellectual property resides in unstructured files scattered across NAS devices, cloud drives, and legacy backups. The joint solution gathers the data for protection and recovery purposes, then aggregates and indexes this data—no matter the format or location—turning what was once fragmented data into an AI-ready data lake. 
2. Governance and security: Gen AI introduces risks around data leakage, privacy, and compliance. Cohesity Gaia and DataProtect deliver policy-based role-based access controls, auditing, and zero-trust enforcement, ensuring only authorized users and AI models can access sensitive information.
3. Infrastructure complexity: Building and maintaining AI infrastructure can be time-consuming and costly. The Cisco AI Pod combined with NVIDIA AI Enterprise is a validated and proven design that includes validated hardware/software stacks, automated operations, and seamless scalability to eliminate deployment and configuration guesswork for dramatically reduced spin-up time.

With this integrated approach, organizations can deploy responsible AI faster, more securely, and with clear business alignment from the outset.

“Customers want a complete solution,” said Tom Gillis, Sr. Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure and Security, Cisco. “Nobody wants to piece together a data center from lots of little bits and pieces. And so, we have scoured the market and we think Cohesity is really the leader in data protection and we’ve been very successful together in the market bringing this integrated solution to our customers.”

(Watch Sanjay Poonen, CEO and President, Cohesity, and Tom Gillis, Sr. Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure and Security, Cisco discuss the importance of our joint partnership.)

Under the hood: Secure, scalable AI 

The heart of the solution is the seamless integration of infrastructure, software, and data management:

• Cisco AI Pod Infrastructure: Modular GPU nodes leverage high-speed Nexus networking for optimal AI performance, with automated deployment and management via Cisco Intersight.
• NVIDIA AI Enterprise Suite: Delivers proven AI pipelines, model training, and inference with enterprise-grade reliability, support, and compatibility across on-premises and hybrid environments.
• Cohesity DataProtect and Gaia:
  • DataProtect captures data across on-prem, multiple clouds, and SaaS—providing cyber resilience and rapid recovery.
  • Gaia indexes and classifies backup data, powering semantic search and RAG pipelines for fast, chat-like discovery of relevant business information.
  • Policy-driven RBAC, auditing, and zero-trust access underpin every interaction, supporting regulatory compliance and responsible data management.

This level of integration means organizations can move from protected data to actionable GenAI insights without complex ETL, risky data movement, or weeks of infrastructure setup.

Business outcomes: Day-1 AI insights and enterprise resilience

The most compelling value of the Cisco-NVIDIA-Cohesity solution is what it delivers to the business:

• Rapid time to value: Deploy in weeks, realize business insights from day one—without waiting for data engineering or infrastructure buildouts.
• Immediate business insights: Unlock generative AI-powered insights, summaries, and recommendations across time and teams by pulling directly from your backup and unstructured data.
• AI-driven insights and automation: Accelerate decision-making and empower business users and IT teams alike.

These outcomes translate directly to competitive advantage, helping organizations innovate securely, respond faster to market demands, and maintain trust with stakeholders.

Get real results from turnkey, responsible AI

The path to enterprise AI doesn’t have to be uncertain or risky. With Cisco AI Pod, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, Cohesity DataProtect, and Cohesity Gaia, organizations gain a secure, governed, and high-performance foundation for Gen AI—ready to deliver value from day one. By integrating world-class infrastructure, AI software, and data protection, this solution enables IT leaders to drive responsible innovation, ensure resilience, and unlock the full potential of their enterprise data.

Move beyond the barriers and realize the promise of Gen AI—confidently and securely. Learn how your organization can accelerate insights, streamline AI deployment, and protect what matters most with the Cisco-NVIDIA-Cohesity solution.

• Learn more about Cohesity and Cisco