Netflash

Any network built through years of acquisitions will typically accumulate the structural debt of overlapping infrastructure, fragmented inventory, and no single view of what is running where. For Lumen Technologies , that debt compounded across four decades and dozens of acquisitions. Lumen is an enterprise network infrastructure company serving large enterprise, government and wholesale customer…

In a highly unusual move, Amazon has confirmed that it is waiving an entire month’s usage charges for customers using two Middle Eastern datacenters disrupted by Iranian drone attacks earlier this month. The attacks on March 1 damaged two Amazon datacenters in the region, ME-CENTRAL-1 (United Arab Emirates) and ME-SOUTH-1 (Bahrain), something the company acknowledged the following day. “These str…

I used to think AI performance was mostly a GPU problem. Then I watched a “healthy” GPU fleet crawl. Not because we ran out of compute, but because we ran out of movement. Tokens waiting on data. GPUs waiting on batches. Services waiting on east-to-west traffic. Storage queues quietly turning into tail latency. Today, I do not even call this a storage problem. It is an information supply chain pr…

The current web is optimized for surveillance capitalism; this is positive compared to other ways our data can be used. Data from activities on native utility applications and communications on social messaging applications, both offline and online, are routed through centralized systems managed by admins who decide whether these actions proceed to completion at all and what happens to the data p…

The European Commission is continuing to investigate the theft of data from its cloud infrastructure earlier this week. On Thursday, the Commission revealed there had been an attack on its Europa.eu platform, offering few details, then, on Friday, security news site Bleeping Computer reported that the attack had involved the compromise of an account or accounts on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The n…

An age-old problem for enterprise IT managers has always been data sprawl . However, in the era of AI, where data is needed from every potential source available, scale in data sprawl become unmanageabl e. Existing architectures weren’t designed for distributing processing, which is part and parcel of AI training. Data center provider Equinix says it has the solution: The Distributed AI Hub power…

During a wave of privatization in the 1980s and 90s, there was a separation of postal services and telecoms throughout Europe as governments looked to tap into the liberalization of telecoms markets by breaking up their national PTTs — government agencies with a monopoly on operating postal, telephone, and telegraph services. Now, for one country at least, it’s back to square one: Poste Italiane …

To find a brief definition of the networking term you are looking for user your browser’s “Find” feature then follow links to a fuller explanation. Abstraction interface (SAI) An abstraction interface (SAI) is an API designed to allow network software (such as an operating system) to control the hardware of a network switch . Traditionally, if you bought a switch from a specific vendor, you had t…

More processor coverage on Network World: AMD news and insights | Nvidia news and insights Intel is hoping for a turnaround under its new CEO, Lip-BuTan. Intel’s Q1 2025 revenue was $12.7 billion, flat year-over-year. While revenue for its client computing group dropped 8%, the data center and AI segment showed an 8% increase, driven by Xeon volume. Intel is pushing its Gaudi 3 AI accelerators an…

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…

Poaching talent has become a default response to the data center staffing crunch, but new findings from Uptime Institute suggest the strategy is unsustainable. Nearly half of operators (46%) report difficulty finding qualified candidates, according to Uptime Intelligence , the institute’s research and analysis practice. In addition, 37% struggle to keep the staff they already have—despite escalat…

For 36 years, Arm Holdings made CPU designs and licensed them to anyone who wanted them, who then designed and made their own custom modifications. But that is changing. Arm has announced its expansion into production of silicon products for the first time in the company’s history. The company’s first product is the Arm AGI CPU, an Arm-designed CPU purpose built for AI data centers, with Meta as …

The need for high-throughput and energy-efficient optical infrastructure, driven by AI demands, was a recurring theme at this month’s Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference in Los Angeles. The so-called opticalization of the network, where fiber replaces copper and optical connectivity becomes imperative, is critical in the AI era, according to OFC 2026 participants and industry watchers. …

While all eyes were on Nvidia GTC last week, there was another event happening with implications for the evolution of AI. The Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) conference took place in Los Angeles and addressed the desperate hunt for more capacity. For years, the networking industry has operated on a comfortable four-year innovation cycle. But as generative AI transitions from a boardroom initia…

Datacenter battery backup units are selling out years in advance, and artificial intelligence is driving the shortage — at least according to Panasonic Energy, which disclosed this week that hyperscaler customers have already pre-committed to more than 80% of its planned output through fiscal year 2029. The disclosure came as the Japanese company outlined its plans to scale production to meet sur…