Today we're announcing that Mulga Defense Corporation is now an official Cisco Registered Partner, accepted into the Cisco 360 Partner Program as a Select Developer. The milestone follows the validation of Spinifex, our open-source AWS-compatible cloud, on Cisco Unified Edge hardware. This combination creates an AWS-compatible cloud on AI-ready edge hardware, out of the box.
To meet the growing demand for AI at the edge, Cisco offers their Unified Edge platform. Now, for operators that have invested years into AWS tooling such as Terraform, Kubernetes and S3, you can leverage those capabilities onto AI-ready edge compute, with zero reliance on the cloud.
Cisco Unified Edge is the enterprise-grade edge hardware. Spinifex is the AWS-compatible cloud runtime that lets existing workloads lift-and-shift onto it unchanged. This partnership makes that a validated, supported combination.
Why Cisco Unified Edge
Cisco Unified Edge is Cisco's AI-ready edge computing platform, a full-stack platform that brings compute, networking, storage, and security into a single modular chassis for real-time AI inference outside the data centre. The hardware is the 3RU, short-depth Cisco UCS XE9305 chassis: up to five hot-swappable sled nodes — Xeon 6 SoC compute, GPUs, NVMe storage, and a Cisco 8255 secure-router node — managed as a fleet through Cisco Intersight, and aimed at real-time AI where the data centre can't reach: retail floors, hospitals, factories, and branch sites.
What makes Unified Edge a strong substrate for Spinifex is how its design lines up with an edge-cloud workload:
- Converged compute, storage, and networking in one box. The XE9305 chassis takes up to five sled nodes: XE130c and XE150c M8 compute on Intel Xeon 6 SoC (12/20/32-core, up to 768 GB–1 TB memory), up to four E3.S NVMe SSDs for 120 TB of storage, dual 25G NICs, and a Cisco 8255 secure-router node. Spinifex maps straight onto it — EC2 on the compute nodes, EBS and S3 (via our erasure-coded Predastore) on the NVMe, VPC across the built-in networking. The full AWS primitive set bundled in one chassis.
- GPU-ready for inference at the edge. The XE130c takes a 75 W GPU; the XE150c takes full-height GPUs including NVIDIA RTX PRO. Spinifex passes them through to guest VMs at near-native performance for vision, signals, and RAG pipelines, and the Xeon 6 SoC's CPU-native inferencing runs smaller models with no GPU at all.
- Scales inside a single 3RU chassis. Five front slots mean you start with one compute node and grow to a multi-node cluster in the same box. Spinifex scales the same way, from a single-host cloud up to an HA cluster with erasure-coded object storage, so you can add capacity without changing the platform.
- Interoperability without a rewrite. AWS workloads lift and shift unchanged: EC2, EBS, S3 and VPC behave as they did in-region, Terraform targets the UCS platform the way it targeted us-east-1, and the AWS-native pipelines around them deploy as-is. Only the endpoint changes.
- Enterprise security and fleet management, built in. Unified Edge ships designed-in, embedded zero-trust security with tamper-resistant hardware, and Cisco Intersight provides SaaS-based, zero-touch fleet management across every site. Spinifex layers AWS-compatible IAM and STS on top, so access control and audit use the policies your team already writes.
Alternatively, Spinifex can also run standalone in air-gapped deployments or in scenarios where data sovereignty is crucial. Whatever the use case, Spinifex on Cisco's Unified Edge provides unparalleled operational flexibility.
Validated, not just compatible
We stood Spinifex up on Cisco's own hardware and confirmed the core surface runs end to end. Our test bench was a three-node Cisco Unified Edge cluster: each node a single-socket Intel Xeon 6543P-B (32 cores / 64 threads) with roughly 500 GiB of memory and four KIOXIA CD8P NVMe drives, wired over dual 25GbE, with an NVIDIA L4 passed through to a guest via VFIO on one node. We used it to run Spinifex services, including EC2-style compute, VPC networking, and IAM, and put the storage layer through its paces. The methodology lives in our platform benchmark.
We also spun up a simple computer-vision pipeline (write-up in our vision pipeline benchmark) and, out of curiosity, pitted Intel's AMX instruction set directly against the L4 for LLM serving (our AMX vs L4 test).
Verified independently by Cisco
Beyond the testing we ran, Cisco's own team independently evaluated Spinifex on Unified Edge, putting the platform through their verification process rather than taking our word for it. That independent verification is what led to our acceptance into the Cisco 360 Partner Program.
What Cisco 360 + Select Developer means
Being accepted into the Cisco 360 Partner Program means the Spinifex-on-Unified-Edge combination is a recognised, validated pairing rather than a science project. It establishes a clear path to procurement, and unifies two vendors who can service the same deployment.
Spinifex remains open-source under AGPL-3.0, and able to run fully self-contained with no external control plane. On Unified Edge you can lean on Cisco Intersight for connected, SaaS-based fleet management where that suits the deployment, or run Spinifex standalone where it doesn't.
What this unlocks
For Cisco's customers, Unified Edge gains a validated, AWS-compatible cloud runtime: lift-and-shift AWS workloads onto enterprise edge hardware without rewriting them, and run real AI inference next to where the data is created. For Mulga's customers, Spinifex gains a hardened, enterprise-grade, globally-supported reference platform to run on, with Cisco's supply chain and support behind the hardware.
Get in touch
Spinifex on Cisco Unified Edge is available now. To discuss a deployment or request an evaluation, get in touch via our contact page.
Thanks to the Cisco team for the validation work behind this partnership, and to the operators who told us they wanted an AWS-compatible cloud on hardware they can actually buy.
