Netflash

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is pushing forward to meet evolving networking needs with the release of UEC 1.1 on October 12. The UEC got its start in 2023 to help improve Ethernet for the growing needs of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) networks. The consortium published its 1.0 specification in June 2025. That release defined a transport protocol, congestion control mechanisms and…

SolarWinds this week introduced Avior, an agentic AI system, to help network teams automate operational tasks, reduce alert noise, and improve infrastructure management while letting administrators maintain control over autonomous actions. Avior builds on the company’s existing AI framework by adding goal-oriented agents that can execute tasks, not just provide recommendations. The technology wor…

The U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is awarding up to $300 million each to four companies to help them get their quantum computing hardware ready for independent testing. These four companies—IBM, IonQ, Diraq, and Atom Computing—have officially entered “Stage C” of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, joining Microsoft and PsiQuantum, which were already …

When quantum vendor IonQ on Sunday announced a $1.2 billion all stock deal to take over cybersecurity vendor Elisity, it spoke of a near-term future where enterprise quantum cybersecurity needs will move beyond replacing to-be-outdated encryption. The acquisition brings together IonQ’s post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and quantum key distribution (QKD) capabilities and Elisity’s enterprise Zero Tr…

Collaboration events have rarely been must-attend shows for network engineers. Meetings, contact centers, and room systems ran on the network, and the network team kept latency low and Wi-Fi up. At Cisco’s WebexOne 2026 event in Austin, it became clear that this division of labor is ending. Over two days of keynotes and analyst sessions, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel and h…

NetBox began in 2016 as an open-source tool for keeping a record of what is on a network. In the modern AI era, understanding what’s on the network is more complicated and necessary than ever before. NetBox Labs today announced new capabilities for its Infrastructure Intelligence Platform at NetBox Evolve, its first conference, held at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The company also announced p…

Cisco and Nvidia have teamed up again. This time it’s to deliver a high-capacity pluggable optical system that promises to let customers more quickly and easily build Ethernet AI fabrics. Introduced at the Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit 2026 this week, the Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable ( USFP ) module supports 400 Gb/s-per-lane electrical signals, allowing up to 12.8T of capac…

AMD has introduced Helion, an open blueprint for data center racks that aims to give CPUs a larger role in running AI agents while allowing customers to configure GPU resources around their inference requirements. Based on Open Compute Project (OCP) specifications, the architecture supports different combinations of computing hardware. AMD cited examples including CPU-only racks for hyperscalers,…

For the past two years, the checkbook has been wide open as enterprises have poured billions into AI models, compute, licenses and GPUs. Yet despite those massive investments, a growing number of organizations are running into the same problem: they can’t reliably access what they just built. When those expensive AI workflows collapse, it’s easy for leaders to assume the models aren’t working. Ho…

When Ørsted set out to automate its network operations, speed wasn’t the primary goal. The energy company first needed to get its network data under control and establish processes that would consistently meet its security and compliance requirements. João Soares, lead IT security consultant at Ørsted in Copenhagen, joined the company nearly five years ago to focus full time on network automation…

For the first time in 14 years, the internet is getting a ton more generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs). When the internet’s domain system started back in 1985, there were only a few primary TLDs: .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov and .mil. The number of TLDs grew in small fits and spurts until 2012 , when 1,241 new gTLDs were added. The internet has changed over the last 14 years, and now ICANN is openi…

Oracle has reportedly signed a five-year, $7 billion agreement to provide Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent with access to roughly 100,000 advanced AI accelerators deployed in Oracle data centers across Southeast Asia, helping Tencent to sidestep restrictions on advanced AI equipment. The deal, first reported by the Financial Times , would represent Tencent’s largest overseas cloud commitme…

What if the three remaining hard disk manufacturers became two? Seagate Technology and Western Digital control 90% of the market, according to market researcher TrendForce, with Toshiba picking up the crumbs. Seagate and WD both make their own magnetic drive heads, but Toshiba relies on a third party, TDK, which also sells to Seagate and WD when they need extra capacity. Seeking to guarantee supp…

For the third week running, Citrix has issued a critical security warning to customers managing their own NetScaler ADC and Netscaler Gateway instances, this time warning of a memory overflow vulnerability enabling denial of service or remote code execution. This week’s vulnerability affects ADC and Gateway when configured as a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) identity provider (IdP); ol…

Enterprise organizations typically use six to eight observability tools, creating integration, staffing, and visibility challenges as network operations teams adopt AI to help manage complex IT environments, according to research from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). EMA surveyed 356 enterprise IT professionals and found that tool sprawl is consuming engineering time, increasing staffing d…