Netflash

AI’s insatiable demand for chips has already had an effect on the IT market, and it could be about to get worse: Nvidia has entered into a multi-year strategic partnership with Meta to fill the social network’s new AI data centers with its cutting-edge processors. Nvidia will supply Meta with millions of its Blackwell and Rubin GPUs, and Meta will integrate Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet switches int…

As AI usage continues to scale, there is a distinct type of application traffic that is having an impact on networking. Training isn’t the issue, it’s inference. Training runs in centralized clusters on predictable schedules. Inference is distributed, latency-sensitive and subject to real-time constraints around power availability, data sovereignty, and cost. The network fabric that is routing th…

At its recent Innovation Day 2026 event, Western Digital previewed two technologies in development to increase HDD throughput : high bandwidth drive technology (HBDT) and dual pivot technology (DPT). HBDT enables simultaneous reading and writing from multiple heads on multiple tracks, delivering up twice the bandwidth of conventional HDDs without power penalties. DPT adds a second set of independ…

Connecting battery-powered sensors across large areas has been a persistent challenge for enterprise and industrial IoT deployments. Wi-Fi lacks the range and consumes too much power for long-life sensor applications. Cellular covers the distance but introduces licensing costs and coverage gaps in dense indoor environments. Bluetooth is limited to short range. None of those technologies were desi…

Enterprises struggling with the cost and complexity of long-term data archival could soon have a new option: a piece of glass. New research published on Wednesday suggests that a borosilicate glass plate 120mm square and just 2mm thick can store 4.8TB of data across 301 layers with accelerated aging tests, indicating that the data would remain intact for at least 10,000 years. “Glass is a permane…

Arista Networks is extending its telemetry capabilities in response to AI-driven demand for more comprehensive network management and greater visibility across complex environments. The networking company shared early details about advanced telemetry technology that’s in the works to help its AI and cloud customers improve their monitoring and diagnostic capabilities. Telemetry already is at the …

Network testing has grown more complex as environments increasingly combine cellular, network slicing and cloud-native architectures. Lab and validation teams now work across multi-vendor, multi-domain stacks, and when failures occur, resolving them can require several domain experts working in parallel. It’s a challenge that Spirent Communications—which was acquired by Keysight Technologies in O…

Modular data center vendor ECL has announced ECL FlexGrid, a power-agnostic platform designed to support everything from training clusters to inferencing at the edge. By supporting data centers that use a variety of power sources, FlexGrid enables operators to deploy their compute gear anywhere, including close to users and data sources, even where grid power and hydrogen are not readily availabl…

While the predicted mass exodus from VMware hasn’t materialized, many enterprises are actively reducing their VMware footprint, a new survey shows. Broadcom’s 2023 acquisition of VMware prompted forecasts that enterprises would rethink their virtualization strategies amid fears that VMware license costs would triple. So far, though, only 14% of enterprises questioned have so far seen prices doubl…

As AI infiltrates more and more business operations, enterprise IT teams are under pressure to ensure their systems, applications, and networks are resilient enough to absorb the impact. At the same time, cloud service providers and companies supporting the global Internet infrastructure—on which enterprises heavily rely—need to make sure they can handle the AI-fueled surge in demand. If either o…

Palo Alto Networks has entered an agreement to buy agentic endpoint security vendor Koi . Financial details were not disclosed, but some news outlets have estimated the deal is valued at around $400 million. Members of Israel’s cyber warfare and intelligence group, Unit 8200 , founded Koi in 2024 to focus on building technology to protect what the company calls non-traditional, non-binary softwar…

IT training and certification provider CompTIA this week introduced CompTIA SecAI+ , a new professional certification focused on securing AI systems and applying AI tools within cybersecurity environments. CompTIA SecAI+ addresses the “urgent need for skilled professionals who can both defend against and leverage AI technologies ” in cybersecurity environments, according to CompTIA. “As AI expand…

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…

India’s Adani Group committed $100 billion on Tuesday to build a renewable-powered, hyperscale AI data center platform across the country by 2035, as Western markets struggle to expand capacity amid mounting power shortages and regulatory resistance. The investment targets a 5-gigawatt national data center platform combining renewable generation, transmission infrastructure, and high-density AI c…

Arista Networks dialed up a strong fourth quarter, fueled by AI and campus Ethernet networking, to close out last year. “2025 has been another defining year for Arista. With the momentum of generative AI and cloud and enterprise, we have achieved well beyond our goal, at 28.6% growth driving a record revenue of $9 billion,” said Jayshree Ullal , CEO and chairperson of Arista, during the vendor’s …