Buying GPUs is easy. Building an AI system that keeps them busy is something else entirely.

Recorded live at Cisco Live, this conversation with Cisco's Will Eatherton and WWT's Eric Fairfield explores what happens after the hardware arrives. Networking, storage, orchestration and security rarely get the same attention as GPUs, yet they're often the difference between an AI investment that scales and one that sits idle. The organizations that get the most from AI won't be the ones with the most compute. They'll be the ones that build the best systems around it.

More about this week's guests: 

Eric Fairfield helps organizations design the networking foundations that power modern AI infrastructure. With deep expertise in Cisco ACI, VMware NSX and high-performance data center networking, he works with enterprises to solve the complex architecture challenges that determine whether AI environments perform at scale.

Will Eatherton leads Cisco's Data Center, Internet and Cloud Infrastructure Engineering team, helping shape the networking architectures behind enterprise AI. From high-performance Ethernet fabrics to AI infrastructure at scale, his work focuses on the systems that make modern AI possible.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.