This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence has moved from the lab into the data center, and the network underneath it is no longer ordinary. Training and inference workloads demand lossless fabrics, GPU-dense compute, high-throughput storage, and telemetry that actually tells you what is happening. This course teaches you how to design, build, and operate that infrastructure on Cisco — and prepares you to pass the 300-640 DCAI (Implementing Cisco Data Center AI Infrastructure) exam, a concentration toward your CCNP Data Center certification.

We start with the fundamentals: what AI, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI actually are, the workloads they create, and where they run — cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge. From there we move into network design for AI: bandwidth, latency, scalability, and the non-blocking, lossless fabric requirements that make or break a cluster. You will go deep on the technologies that matter for the exam and the job — RDMA and RoCEv2, PFC, ECN, and ETS congestion management, intelligent buffers, and QoS on the Nexus 9000 family.

Then we cover compute and storage: CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, SmartNICs and NVIDIA BlueField, Cisco UCS C- and X-Series, UCS management through Intersight, and modern storage with NVMe and NVMe-oF. Finally, you will deploy and operate a fabric with Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, stand up open-source GPT for RAG, and troubleshoot with telemetry and Splunk.

And you will not just watch — you will practice. The course includes seven downloadable, step-by-step hands-on lab guides that walk you through the real workflows: standing up an AI cluster fabric with NDFC, measuring RoCEv2 workload performance, deploying open-source GPT for RAG, troubleshooting an AI/ML fabric with Splunk, and more — each ready to follow in your own lab or a free Cisco dCloud environment. You also get two full practice tests with 130 exam-style questions, every answer backed by a detailed explanation, so you can find your weak spots and walk into test day knowing exactly what to expect.

Every lesson is tight, visual, and exam-aligned. By the end you will be able to read an AI infrastructure requirement and design the Cisco solution that meets it — with confidence on test day and on the job.