Netflash

Microsoft expanded its sovereign cloud offerings on Tuesday, adding new security, governance and AI capabilities as customers, particularly in Europe, demand greater assurance over where data is stored, who can access it and how critical services operate during disruptions. The announcement builds on Microsoft’s ongoing digital sovereignty efforts, assisting organizations in applying appropriate …

Proponents of SONiC made a strong showing at last week’s Open Compute Project (OCP) Global Summit, where vendors including Cisco, Microsoft, and Nokia championed SONiC’s capabilities as an open Ethernet platform for AI networking. The Linux-based network operating system decouples network software from the underlying hardware and allows it to run on hundreds of switches and ASICs from multiple ve…

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…

Gartner kicked off its IT Symposium/Xpo this week and unveiled its annual list of the top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in the coming year. AI systems today are operating in an architectural vacuum, “generating software faster than humans can review it, creating unmanaged credential paths and binding processes to single-source vendor monopolies,” said Gene Alvarez…

AI agents are driving up telemetry costs and complicating network management as enterprises struggle to monitor the technology and control unexpected expenses, according to new research from Cisco Splunk . The company’s State of Observability 2026 report found that 57% of organizations have observability costs that exceed the cost of the infrastructure being monitored. Another 60% said unexpected…

Investors are pouring more into AI data center infrastructure than they can hope to recoup by 2030, according to Gartner. “Enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst Will Sommer. AI data center owners would need to generate $8.5 trillion in revenue through 20…

The OCP Global Summit is taking place this week in San Jose, Calif., and the news is flowing. The summit is an annual conference of the Open Compute Project , an industry initiative focused on developing more open, efficient, and scalable hardware designs for data centers and other computing infrastructure. The summit covers the physical infrastructure behind cloud computing and AI data centers, …

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,…