Netflash

IBM has inked a $240 million deal with neocloud provider Together AI to offer a cloud service that will run large capacity, open-source AI inference workloads . The service will be based on a large cluster of Nvidia HGX B300 systems running Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and residing in IBM Cloud. Together AI will then use this cluster to provide open-source model inference services for enterpris…

OVH is increasing the prices of its servers, some by as much as 87%, for both new and existing customers, blaming AI’s insatiable demand driving the rising cost of the RAM and storage it uses in its data centers. The European cloud operator specializes in low-cost bare metal and public cloud offerings. CIOs will be familiar with the balancing act OVH has had to perform over the last year. In a Mo…

Lead times of nine to 12 or even 18 months. Costs rising by 35%, 45%, even 50% to 200%. More than halfway through 2026, the market for IT infrastructure that’s crucial for enterprise projects, including those involving artificial intelligence, is strapped. Memory is at the root of the shortages. Memory prices “have risen by 50% to 200%, resulting in PC prices increasing by 35% to 45% and some ser…

Millions of people rely on a network of unpaid volunteers to stay anonymous online, and for 25 years that network has run on altruism rather than profit. Tor , short for The Onion Router, routes a user’s traffic through three volunteer operated relays, as many as 9,000 of them scattered across the globe, so no single relay knows both who is asking and where they are going. At the DEF CON security…

Sitting inside almost every server is a potential backdoor that could put an enterprise network at risk. Baseboard management controllers, or BMCs, are the hardware embedded in server motherboards that provide remote power control, console access, and firmware updates independent of the host operating system. IPMI is the protocol most commonly used to reach them. At the DEF CON 34 conference, sec…

Samsung Electronics has unveiled a trio of next-generation memory technologies aimed at overcoming the performance, power and capacity limitations facing artificial intelligence infrastructure. The announcements, made at the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) conference, introduced new concepts for vertically integrated memory along with a breakthrough NAND architecture designed for the AI era. T…

As Europe swelters in a heatwave, residents probably don’t want to hear about ways to make their homes even hotter, but that’s what Polish property developer Citylink is talking about, with plans to dump waste heat from a new data center in Wrocław into the municipal district heating network. Citylink is designing the data center so that heat from servers can be recovered instead of being dissipa…

As enterprises look for ways to cut the cost of running AI models in production, AMD is betting that not every AI workload will be best served by a power-hungry general-purpose GPU. AMD has agreed to buy Taalas, the Canadian designer of chips that permanently embed a trained AI model’s weights into custom silicon, instead of repeatedly loading them from memory during inference as conventional GPU…

Enterprises deploying agentic AI may need a new generation of AI servers as conventional GPU-centric infrastructure struggles to efficiently execute multi-step AI workflows, according to researchers from Microsoft Azure and the University of Texas at Austin. Drawing on production telemetry from Microsoft’s Azure cloud and experiments with representative open-source agent frameworks, the researche…

For decades, Network Address Translation (NAT) has been the default way IP addresses are provided inside larger networks, as a means to deal with the challenges of IPv4 address availability. The basic premise behind NAT is that private addresses stay private, but that assumption might not be entirely accurate anymore (if it ever really was). At Black Hat USA 2026 , researcher Malcolm Stagg , an i…

Ready to travel to gain hands-on experience with new networking and infrastructure tools? Tech conferences give attendees a chance to access product demos, network with peers, earn continuing education credits, and catch a celebrity keynote or live entertainment. Check out our calendar of upcoming network, I&O, and data center conferences, and let us know if we’re missing any of your favorites. A…

AWS has added AI Insights to AWS Marketplace, a feature that it says is designed to help CIOs and developers better evaluate and compare products using AI-generated summaries and recommendations as enterprises grapple with increasing pressure to justify technology spending. “Available in the pricing section of the listing in AWS Marketplace, AI Insights explains each product’s pricing in plain la…

Arista Networks shared some good news about its earnings and future directions during its second-quarter earnings call this week. For starters, Arista reported its first-ever $3 billion quarter. The company logged revenue of $3.036 billion, an increase of 12.1% compared to the first quarter of 2026, and an increase of 37.7% from the second quarter of 2025. Just five years ago, Arista reported $2.…

Data released at this week’s Black Hat security conference suggests the era of manual zero-day hunting and 50-day patch windows is coming to an end. This is a double-edged sword for security professionals: Vulnerabilities can now be found at machine speed, perhaps bringing the discovery time eventually to zero, but it also means that AI-driven threats require autonomous operations to protect the …

ThousandEyes, a Cisco company, monitors how ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update on internet and cloud traffic performance. Note: We have archived prior-year outage updates, includ…