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The five fastest-growing hubs for data center expansion include an interesting mix of urban areas that have one thing in common: lots of available power. Based on projected data-center capacity growth, Las Vegas/Reno is the No. 1 fastest growing data center site in the US, followed by Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas-Fort Worth, according to a new report from cloud security vendor Upwind. Northern Virginia didn’t make the list – but that’s because i

Pressure to implement AI plans is on the rise, but the readiness of enterprise networks to handle AI workloads has actually declined over the past year, according to new research from Cisco. Cisco’s second annual AI Readiness Index notes a “huge chasm” between the urgency companies feel to deploy AI and their ability to actually do it. Some 8,000 global companies were surveyed for the AI Readiness Index, which aims to mea

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 operat

A new certification program from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Linux Foundation is aimed at validating the skills needed to utilize OpenTelemetry to gain visibility across distributed systems. The OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA) certification is designed for application engineers, DevOps engineers, system reliability engineers, platform engineers, or IT professionals looking to increase their abilities to leverage telemetry data across distributed systems of cloud-native and microservices-based applications. “OpenTelemetry is a transformative o

Microsoft’s cloud business is under surveillance in Europe: The association of Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has set up new monitoring body to ensure the tech giant complies with a legal settlement to keep cloud licensing practices fair in the region. The European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO) will operate independently from CISPE, and will also keep an eye on other licensing practices impacting both cloud providers and customers in the region. ECCO is aimed at monitoring the practices of big tech companies such as Microsoft to ensure the market remains competitive for all players. It was formed as part of

Back in 2019, Kannan Kothandaraman helped to start Selector AI after spending years in the networking trenches at big vendors including Juniper and Cisco. Since the beginning, the vision for Selector AI is to build a technology that helps networking professionals better operate and optimize network infrastructure and services. The company’s founding team was inspired by what it learned while working with hyperscalers. They noticed how these large companies are able to use data from multiple domains to make data-driven decisions for their network operations, rather than letting the network dictate how the business should be run. The Selector AI founders saw an opportunity to bring this

The German government has blamed an act of sabotage for the cutting of two important undersea fiber optic cables, one connecting connecting Finland and Germany, and the other linking Sweden and Lithuania, on Sunday and Monday. The first cable break happened at around 8 a.m. GMT (3 a.m. EST) on Sunday in the 135-mile undersea link between the Swedish island of Gotland and Lithuania, Lithuanian operator Telia Lietuva said. Hours later, at 2 a.m. GMT on Monday (9 p.m. EST on Sunday), Finnish telecoms company

IBM is expanding its AI accelerator options for enterprise users of its cloud service. AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators are now available as a service on IBM Cloud, the vendors announced. With 192GB of high-bandwidth memory, the MI300X accelerators are equipped for large AI model inferencing and fine tuning. Their large memory capacity can help customers run larger models with fewer GPUs, potentially lowering costs for inferencing, according to AMD. To help optimize performance for enterprise customers running AI applications, the partnership calls

The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services is critical for enterprise organizations. ThousandEyes, a Cisco company, monitors how providers 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. (Note: We have archived prior-year updates, including the 2023 outage report and our

Secure access service edge provider Cato Networks today announced it added transport layer security inspection capabilities to its SASE platform to enable customers to inspect TLS traffic more easily and quickly. Cato Safe TLS Inspection is part of the Cato SASE Cloud Platform, and it provides customers will the ability to fully inspect TLS traffic flows — which only 45% of 2,500 Cato customers currently do, Cato found in its