Netflash

A few years back, Bhaskar Ramachandran read the tea leaves and what he saw was clear: With all the enhancements hyperscalers continuous make, there was no value in having on-premises data centers any longer. “There is just no way for a private company to match that,” says Ramachandran, global vice president and CIO of paints and coatings manufacturer PPG. “This is their business, and they’re real…

Cisco has bolstered the security and AI control features in its latest release of SD-WAN software. The company rolled out Cisco SD-WAN 26.1.1 with a number of new features that, for example, let enterprise customers define security policies once and apply them consistently across the network, gain end-to-end visibility, and pivot from a traditional WAN to a high-performance, AI-ready fabric—all w…

New research from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) suggests that the first wave of AI adoption—centered on chatbots and virtual assistants—is succumbing to an AI agent-driven model . In a survey of 458 IT professionals actively using AI in network operations, EMA found that just 15% prefer traditional chatbot-style interfaces. The same respondents also reported the lowest levels of success …

IT teams managing multi-vendor networks are dealing with a growing volume of alerts and a shrinking pool of engineers with the expertise to act on them. AI, and more specifically agentic AI, is increasingly being positioned as the approach to solve that challenge. The latest vendor to embrace agentic AI is Auvik, which has been building out a cloud-based IT and network management platform for the…

Security researchers have discovered a chilling backdoor aimed at Cisco System firewalls that exploits unpatched vulnerabilities to maintain persistence, even after patching. This means that attackers can continue to access compromised devices without re-exploiting the holes. At risk are devices running Cisco ASA or Firepower software, including certain Firepower and Secure Firewall devices. So f…

Cloud storage provider Backblaze has been ripping out its 100-gigabit links and replacing them with 400-gigabit links because AI has changed how traffic flows inside their data center. AI workloads running on neocloud providers like CoreWeave and Lambda are creating bursty, unpredictable flows that overwhelm traditional capacity planning models designed for traditional, steady-state cloud traffic…

AI is promising a lot these days, to change how we work, influence how we live, and transform network traffic . It’s interesting, exciting even, but suppose it’s all hype? Wall Street has been increasingly antsy about AI claims, and Nvidia is arguably in the spotlight of their fears, just as it’s in the spotlight of AI. Will our current AI model transform everything, including the financial fortu…

Ready to travel to gain hands-on experience with new networking and infrastructure tools? Tech conferences – in person and virtual – 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 missin…

Meta is continuing its compute grab as the agentic AI race accelerates to a sprint. Today, the company announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will bring “tens of millions” of AWS Graviton5 cores (one chip contains 192 cores) into its compute portfolio, with the option to expand as its AI capabilities grow. This will make the Llama builder one of the largest Graviton customers…

Cirrascale Cloud Services has announced it will make artificial intelligence models available for on-premise use through Google Distributed Cloud, a move aimed at organizations that want advanced AI capabilities while keeping data inside their own firewall. The company said enterprise and public-sector agencies will be able to run Gemini models either on-prem or in Cirrascale data centers, includ…

If you look away from the orbital data center beat, you could miss a lot. Fortunately, I’m a bit obsessed with the whole space thing. Multiple companies continue to make space-related announcements, and they’re all pushing space compute a little further along the path from “this sounds crazy but it might just work” to something that could actually show up in procurement pipelines. (Find out who’s…

Network and infrastructure roles continue to shift as enterprises adopt technologies such as AI-driven network operations , multicloud networking, zero trust network access ( ZTNA ), and SD-WAN . Here’s a recap of some of the latest industry research, hiring statistics, and certification trends that impact today’s network professionals, infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders, and data center…

Cisco today unveiled a prototype switch it says will significantly accelerate the timeline for practical, distributed, quantum-computing-based networks. Cisco’s Universal Quantum Switch is designed to connect quantum systems from different vendors, such as IBM, IonQ, Google and Rigetti, in all major qubit encoding technologies, at room temperature, and over standard telecom fiber, according to Vi…

The advent of artificial intelligence — and in particular dedicated AI data centers — has meant that data movement over the network is more important than ever, as processing of inference and large language model training consumes terabytes of data stored in data centers the size of a football stadium. Not only that, but there is now an increasing effort to tie together distant data centers into …

An exhaustive study by the Financial Times has found that almost half of all data centers projected to open this year are going to be at least three months late if they make it at all. The Financial Times drew upon satellite imagery from the geospatial data analytics company SynMax and cross-checked project progress against public statements and permit documents compiled by the industry research …