Cisco Opens Kraków Lab for Testing Networks Under AI Workloads

Cisco has launched a new Customer Experience lab in Kraków, where customers and partners can test network infrastructure, including systems built for artificial intelligence workloads. The opening expands what the company says is Cisco's largest CX center in Europe.

What Cisco built in Kraków

According to CRN, the lab is meant to help customers design and test infrastructure tailored to their needs, including for AI workloads. The company says it will be one of the largest network research and validation centers it runs in the region.

LoveKraków.pl reports that the lab will be used to test network infrastructure used by banks, hospitals and telecom operators, among others. Engineers can first recreate a customer's environment and check changes under controlled conditions instead of on a live network.

How the lab works

Network topologies, both physical and virtual, are orchestrated programmatically using an infrastructure-as-code approach. The lab also uses AI pod architectures to validate new AI and machine learning workloads. According to the company, environments that used to take weeks to prepare can now be launched, modified and torn down in minutes.

One hundred of the nearly 400 racks sit in a segment isolated from the rest of the networks. Confidential customer configurations and telemetry data go there. According to LoveKraków.pl, the separate zone is meant to allow tests that require working with detailed customer data while keeping it confidential.

The future of AI depends as much on the people who build and secure the infrastructure as on the technology itself - Francine Katsoudas, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Cisco

Training and talent

The lab is also meant to serve as a training environment. Selected Cisco engineers, graduates and local academics can gain experience there in AI networking, infrastructure programmability and cyber defense.

Cisco has been operating in Poland for more than 30 years, and we keep expanding our presence thanks to the engineering talent we find here - Jacek Przybylski, managing director of Cisco in Poland

What it means for Poland

Cisco opened its Kraków Global Services Center in 2012 and later added a network operations center, a SOC and software development services. The new lab is the next stage of that investment. According to Cisco, customers and partners will be able to build prototypes in Kraków and test solutions in near-real conditions before larger-scale deployments.

The lab's specifications come from the company and have not been independently verified. The sources do not give the cost of the investment or the number of new jobs.