Nokia strengthens AI datacentre network performance

Just as artificial intelligence (AI) offers a substantial increase in business efficiency and effectiveness, it also places challenges on the network, necessitating increased network and operational innovation. With such dynamics in mind, Nokia is expanding and enhancing its datacentre networking portfolio to meet the increasing performance and scalability demands of connecting AI workloads, while taking advantage of AI to drive efficiency and reliability into operations.

Specifically, the comms tech company believes the emergence and widespread adoption of agentic AI-enabled applications is reshaping datacentre requirements, prompting a rapid evolution in networking solutions. AI is driving these advancements, it noted, suggesting that there was a dual opportunity for network innovation and operational transformation. Nokia regarded these as the precise forces behind the most recent developments in its datacentre switching portfolio.

Being more specific about the move, Nokia has made additions to its 7220 Interconnect Router (IXR) family of high-performance datacentre switches, along with an enhanced suite of artificial intelligence for operations (AIOps) tools for its Event-Driven Automation (EDA) management platform. Together, these innovations are claimed to deliver the extreme performance and reliability required to support advanced AI training and inference workloads driven by increasing demand for agentic AI applications.

In the realm of scalable performance and flexibility for AI datacentres, Nokia said the upgrades to the 7220 IXR-H6 range of switches are intended to address what it calls the “massive demands” for scalability and high performance in AI datacentres. The technology can now deliver throughput reaching up to 102.4Tbps, with interface speeds at 800GE (Gigabit Ethernet) and 1.6TE, doubling throughput and interface speeds within the same footprint. The switches are compliant with Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) specifications, bringing advanced features designed to optimise and manage packet flows, avoid congestion and drive network efficiency across large-scale AI factory environments of up to one million XPUs and beyond.

Available in both liquid-cooled and air-cooled variants, the switches can be integrated and are compliant with various datacentre rack configurations, and are seen as offering the required flexibility in a diverse range of deployment scenarios.

Nokia also believes it is the only supplier offering hardware that supports both an embedded network operating system (NOS) and SONiC. The new switches can be configured with Nokia’s SR Linux NOS or open source community SONiC, providing datacentre operators with a greater choice of software solutions.

For AI-enabled network operations, Nokia observed that with the pressing need to deliver always-on services, cloud service providers and enterprises alike were prioritising automation, AIOps and modernisation strategies to reduce downtime and ensure resilient performance throughout the datacentre network operations lifecycle.

To address these requirements in an environment of increasing operational scale and complexity, Nokia said it was introducing innovative agentic AI-enabled capabilities into its event-driven automation (EDA) platform.

EDA AIOps combines natural language interactions with the reasoning power of agentic AI to unlock fast and accurate issue identification, root cause analysis, and remediation across the datacentre networking environment. When combined with EDA’s real-time telemetry, integrated digital twin, dry-run and instant roll-back capabilities, network operators can address issues faster and with confidence. Indeed, Nokia cited a Bell Labs Consulting and Futurum’s report datacentre fabric reliability study, noting that such technology could realise a 96% reduction in datacentre network downtime.

Commenting on the announcements, Alan Weckel, founder and technology analyst at research firm 650 Group, said: “The 1.6TE interface speeds on Nokia’s new family of 7220 IXR switches hit a sweet spot in the market as agentic AI compels a change in datacentre networking requirements. Agentic AI-powered AIOps on Nokia’s EDA platform is timely, driving increased operational efficiency and reliability in a demanding network environment. Also great to see Nokia’s commitment to the UEC, as 650 Group analysis projects Ethernet will be the dominant networking protocol for AI moving forward.”

Vach Kompella, senior vice-president and general manager of IP networks business at Nokia, said: “The astonishing growth in AI adoption has led to a dramatic overhaul in how datacentres operate and is driving constant evolution in hardware and operational tools. [The launch] marks one of many milestones for Nokia’s datacentre networking portfolio, and we look forward to bringing even more technology innovation to our global customer base to support the AI super-cycle.”