Research Notes

Everpure: Pure Storage’s Rebrand & Evolution to Data Management Platform

Steve McDowell February 23, 2026

Pure Storage has rebranded as Everpure, reflecting a multi-year evolution from storage management into broader data management, and is also acquiring 1touch: Executive Summary Pure

SUSE Acquires Losant: Extending the Open Edge Stack into Industrial IoT

Steve McDowell February 21, 2026

SUSE announced the acquisition of Losant, a Cincinnati-based industrial IoT (IIoT) platform. The acquisition marks a material expansion for SUSE, moving the company from being primarily an edge infrastructure provider (built around SUSE Linux Micro and K3s) to the application and orchestration layer, where operational data from industrial devices is aggregated, visualized, and acted on.

Dell Expands Private Cloud Portfolio with Nutanix AHV Support

Steve McDowell February 19, 2026

Dell Technologies recently announced the expansion of its Dell Private Cloud offering to support Nutanix AHV as a third hypervisor option, complementing existing support for VMware vSphere and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

IBM FlashSystem: Next Generation, Autonomous Storage Meets Agentic AI

Steve McDowell February 19, 2026

IBM recently announced a significant refresh of its FlashSystem all-flash storage portfolio, replacing the 5300, 7300, and 9500 product lines with new 5600, 7600, and 9600 models. The company also introduced its new FlashSystem.ai, an agentic AI administration layer that IBM claims can reduce manual storage management effort by up to 90%.

Research Note: Microsoft Azure Maia 200 Inference Accelerator

Steve McDowell February 9, 2026

Microsoft recently announced its second-generation custom AI accelerator, the Maia 200. The new chip is an inference-optimized alternative to third-party GPUs in its Azure infrastructure. The company says the accelerator delivers 30% better performance per dollar than existing Azure hardware while supporting OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 models and Microsoft’s own synthetic data generation workloads.

Research Note: Commvault Unified Data Vault, S3-Compatible Protection for Modern Workloads