Research Note: Hammerspace $100M Series B to Accelerate AI Infrastructure Growth
Hammerspace, which provides a high-performance data orchestration solution for AI and hybrid cloud environments, announced it’s raised $100 million in a Series B funding round.
The round, led by Altimeter Capital and including participation from ARK Invest and other strategic investors, values Hammerspace at more than $500 million.
Research Note: Dynatrace & AWS New Strategic Collaboration
Dynatrace and AWS announced a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement, deepening their decade-long partnership that began in 2014. This expanded collaboration aims to address enterprise challenges in digital transformation through enhanced AI-powered observability and security solutions.
OFC 2025: Optical Interconnects Take Center Stage in the AI-First Data Center
AI is reshaping the data center, bringing networking along for the ride. It’s clear that optical networking is rapidly moving from a back-end concern to a front-line enabler of next-generation infrastructure.
AI workloads, with their massive datasets, distributed training pipelines, and high-performance compute requirements, demand interconnect solutions that combine extreme bandwidth with low power consumption and low latency. At last month’s OFC 2025 event in San Francisco, this shift was unmistakable.
Key Takeaways: Microsoft FabCon 2025
At Microsoft’s second annual Fabric Community Conference (FabCon) 2025, held earlier this month in Las Vegas, the company unveiled several significant announcements that together enhance its unified data platform. The updates to Fabric focus on improving data security, AI integration, and streamlined data management.
Research Note: HPE Updates Aruba Networking Central
Hewlett Packard Enterprise recently announced significant enhancements to its HPE Aruba Networking Central platform, which expand its deployment options and strengthen AI and analytics capabilities. The platform now supports four distinct deployment models: public cloud SaaS, virtual private cloud, on-premises, and network-as-a-service.
Research Note: Cohesity’s Updates Cyber-Resilience for Google Cloud
At Google Cloud Next 2025, Cohesity announced several enhancements to its cyber resilience portfolio that provide deeper integrations with Google Cloud’s security capabilities. The announcements focus on AI-driven threat intelligence, incident response, secure recovery environments, and operational integration with Google Security Operations.
Research Note: Rubrik Expands Annapurna to GCP
At Google Cloud Next 2025, Rubrik announced the expansion of Rubrik Annapurna, its API-driven AI data security and governance platform, to Google Cloud. The announcement sees Rubrik delivering Annapurna as a secure data access layer for AI-driven application development within Google’s Agentspace framework.
Research Note: Anthropic/Databricks Partnership
Anthropic recently announced a new five-year strategic partnership with Databricks to integrate its Claude language models, including the newly released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, into the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.
The deal, valued at approximately $100 million, will allow Databricks’ enterprise customers to build, deploy, and govern AI agents that operate directly on their proprietary enterprise data. Databricks will offer Claude models natively through its platform across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Research Note: Infineon Acquires Marvell’s Auto Ethernet Business
Infineon Technologies announced its intention to acquire Marvell Technology’s Automotive Ethernet business for $2.5 billion in cash in a move that expands its microcontroller and automotive systems portfolio.
Research Note: IBM QisKit 2.0
IBM recently released Qiskit SDK v2.0, a major update to its open-source quantum software development kit. The new release is a key element of IBM’s long-term strategy to support utility-scale quantum computing by delivering architectural improvements, higher performance, and expanded interoperability with classical HPC systems.
Research Note: Dell’s Data Protection & Storage Updates
Dell Technologies this week announced a comprehensive set of updates spanning its data protection and storage platforms, including PowerProtect Data Domain, PowerProtect Data Manager, PowerScale, and PowerStore.
Research Note: Enhanced Google Cloud NetApp Volumes
At the 2025 Google Cloud Next event, NetApp and Google Cloud announced a significant expansion of capabilities for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, their jointly developed fully managed file storage offering.
The updates provide enhance performance, scalability, and integration with AI and compliance frameworks, targeting large-scale enterprise workloads
NAND Insider Newsletter: April 6 2025
Each week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, April 6, 2025.
Quick Take: IBM Acquires Hakkoda, Expands Consulting Reach
IBM has announced its acquisition of Hakkoda, a New York-based data and AI consultancy, as part of its strategy to expand its consulting services, particularly in the financial services, public sector, and healthcare and life sciences industries.
Research Note: OpenText Titanium X in CE 25.2
OpenText recently launched Titanium X, part of its Cloud Editions (CE) 25.2 release, its most comprehensive AI-native upgrade across all major product clouds. The release introduces new AI agents, expanded automation capabilities, and integrated cloud security enhancements.
Quick Take: Qualcomm Acquires VinAI’s MovianAI Division
Qualcomm last week announced its acquisition of MovianAI, the generative AI division of VinAI, a leading Vietnamese AI research firm within the Vingroup ecosystem. The acquisition will enhance Qualcomm’s generative AI R&D capabilities by bringing VinAI’s deep expertise in AI, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing to its already-strong arsenal.
Research Note: Portworx Enhanced Kubernetes VM Support
At this week’s Kubecon event, Portworx announced significant updates to its Enterprise 3.3 and Portworx Backup solutions, focused on enabling virtualization administrators to run virtual machines natively in Kubernetes environments.
NAND Insider Newsletter: March 30 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, March 30, 2025.
Research Note: Siemens Acquires Altair Engineering
Siemens AG recently announced the acquisition of Altair Engineering, a leading provider of industrial simulation and HPC software, for an enterprise value of approximately $10 billion.
This is Siemens’ largest acquisition to date and expands the company’s industrial software portfolio with core technologies in mechanical and electromagnetic simulation, data science, AI, and HPC.
Research Note: Verizon Trusted Connection
Earlier this month at MWC 2025, Verizon Business announced the release of its new Verizon Trusted Connection, a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Security Service Edge (SSE) platform that unifies secure connectivity and policy enforcement across enterprise devices, networks, and applications.
The new offering sees Verizon targeting midsize enterprises seeking to consolidate security and networking services under a single provider and management interface.
Research Note: Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE for 5G
Earlier this month at MWC 2025, Palo Alto Networks announced the general availability of Prisma SASE 5G, its new cloud-delivered cybersecurity solution for enterprises leveraging 5G connectivity.
The offering expands the company’s SASE portfolio to provide integrated Zero Trust security for 5G-enabled infrastructure, including mobile users, IoT/OT devices, and SD-WAN endpoints.
Research Note: Lenovo AI Announcements @ GTC 2025
At NVIDIA GTC 2025, Lenovo showed off its latest Hybrid AI Factory platforms in partnership with NVIDIA, focused on agentic AI.
The Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage framework integrates a full-stack hardware and software solution, optimized for both private and public AI model deployments, and spans on-prem, edge, and cloud environments.
NAND Insider Newsletter: March 24, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, March 24, 2025.
Research Note: NetApp AI Data Announcements @ GTC 2025
At the recent GTC 2025 event, NetApp announced, in collaboration with NVIDIA, a comprehensive set of product validations, certifications, and architectural enhancements to its intelligent data products.
The announcements include NetApp’s integration with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, support for NVIDIA’s latest accelerated computing systems, and expanded availability of enterprise-grade AI infrastructure offerings, including NetApp AFF A90 and NetApp AIPod.
Metadata: The Silent Bottleneck in AI Infrastructure
One of the most impactful but underappreciated architectural changes impacting storage performance for AI is how these solutions manage metadata. Separating metadata processing from data storage unlocks significant gains in performance, scalability, and efficiency across AI workloads. Let’s look at why metadata processing matters for AI.
Research Note: WEKA Augmented Memory Grid
At the recent NVIDIA GTC conference, WEKA announced the general availability of its Augmented Memory Grid, a software-defined storage extension engineered to mitigate the limitations of GPU memory during large-scale AI inferencing.
The Augmented Memory Grid is a new approach that integrates with the WEKA Data Platform and leverages NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage (GDS) to bypass CPU bottlenecks and deliver data directly to GPU memory with microsecond latency.
Research Note: IBM Content-Aware Storage for RAG AI Workflows
At the recent NVIDIA GTC event, IBM announced new content-aware capabilities for its Storage Scale platform, expanding its AI infrastructure offerings to support more efficient, semantically rich data access for enterprise AI applications.
Research Note: HPE’s New Full-Stack Enterprise AI Infrastructure Offerings
At the recent NVIDIA GTC 2025, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NVIDIA jointly introduced NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE, full-stack AI infrastructure offerings targeting enterprise deployment of generative, agentic, and physical AI workloads.
The solutions span private cloud AI platforms, observability and management software, reference blueprints, AI development environments, and new AI-optimized servers featuring NVIDIA’s Blackwell architecture.
MWC 2025 Playbook: Enterprise IT’s Big AI & 5G Moment
If you blinked, you might have missed the tidal wave of AI, 5G, and cloud announcements at Mobile World Congress 2025. But don’t worry—we’ve got the cheat sheet.
Liquid Cooling is Front & Center at GTC 2025
One thing was clear at the just-wrapped NVIDIA GTC event: the race to cool the next generation of HPC and AI systems is intensifying.
Let’s take a quick look at some of our favorite announcements.
Research Note: NVIDIA AI Storage Certifications & AI Data Platform
At its annual GTC event in San Jose, NVIDIA announced an expansion of its NVIDIA-Certified Systems program, including the new NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, to include enterprise storage certification to help streamline AI factory deployments.
Research Note: HPE Storage Enhancements for AI
At NVIDIA GTC 2025, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced a slew of new storage capabilities, including a new unified data layer. These capabilities are designed to accelerate AI adoption by integrating structured and unstructured data across multi-vendor and multi-cloud environments.
NVIDIA GTC 2025: The Super Bowl of AI
If you thought AI was already moving fast, buckle up, Jensen Huang threw more fuel on the fire. NVIDIA’s GTC 2025 keynote wasn’t just about new GPUs; it was a full-scale vision of computing’s future, one where AI isn’t just a tool — it’s the foundation of everything.
Let’s look at what Jensen talk about during his 2+ hour keynote.
Quick Take: Google’s $32B Wiz Acquisition
Google today announced its intent to acquire cybersecurity start-up Wiz for a staggering $32 billion in an all-cash deal. This acquisition is one of the largest ever cybersecurity deals.
Research Note: Red Hat Releases OpenShift 4.18
Red Hat recently released OpenShift 4.18, bringing enhancements to the solution for networking, virtualization, security, and deployment flexibility.
Research Note: VDURA V5000 All-Flash AI Storage Appliance
VDURA recently announced its new V5000 All-Flash Appliance, a high-performance storage solution engineered for AI and high-performance computing workloads. The system integrates with the VDURA V11 Data Platform for a combination of high throughput, low-latency access, and seamless scalability.
Research Note: Pure Storage FlashBlade//EXA
Pure Storage recently announced the launch of its new FlashBlade//EXA, a high-performance storage platform designed for AI and HPC workloads. FlashBlade//EXA extends the company’s Purity operating environment and DirectFlash technology to provide extreme performance, scalability, and metadata management that addresses the increasing demands of AI-driven applications.
NAND Insider Newsletter: March 10, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, March 10, 2025.
Research Note: Couchbase Edge Server for Offline-First Data Processing
Couchbase recently announced its new Couchbase Edge Server, a lightweight, offline-first database and sync solution designed for edge computing environments. The new solution extends Couchbase’s mobile data synchronization capabilities to resource-constrained deployments where full-scale database solutions are not feasible.
CoreWeave’s Wild Ride Towards IPO
CoreWeave, the AI-focused cloud provider that’s that was early in catching and riding the generative AI boom, is officially gunning for the big leagues. The NVIDIA-backed company has filed for an IPO, looking to capitalize on the insatiable demand for AI compute.
That’s big news for the AI infrastructure world, where CoreWeave has rapidly positioned itself as a major player, taking on the likes of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
But before you start picturing ringing bells on Wall Street and champagne toasts, there’s more to the story. A lot more.
Research Note: ServiceNow to Acquire Moveworks
ServiceNow has agreed to acquire Moveworks, an enterprise AI assistant and search technology provider. The cash-and-stock transaction, expected to close in the second half of 2025, is ServiceNow’s largest acquisition.
The acquisition strengthens ServiceNow’s agentic AI strategy and expands its capabilities in AI-driven enterprise automation, employee experience, and search.
Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker: March 2025
We’re barely two months into the new year and already the enterprise infrastructure market is heating up.
Here’s what caught our attention over the past month:
Research Note: IBM FlashSystem C200 High-Capacity Flash Archive
IBM recently announced its FlashSystem C200, a new storage platform integrating 46 TB QLC NAND drives to provide an archive tier within a FlashSystem grid. The C200 expands IBM’s FlashSystem portfolio with a high-density flash solution that competes with traditional nearline HDD storage.
IBM claims the C200 provides flash-like performance with QLC-level economics, enhanced endurance, and seamless grid integration.
March Survey Round-Up: AI is Booming, But Data Quality & Security Haunt Leaders
Who doesn’t love a good survey? We’ve combed through a bumper crop of new surveys on AI and tech trends for 2025 to find the bottom line: Executives can’t pump the brakes on AI spending — but lousy data, security holes, and an alarming skills gap could cause serious headaches.
Let’s look at what we’ve learned from February’s batch of surveys tell us about the state of enterprise IT.
March Cyber Tracker: AI, Partnerships, and the Future of Cyber Resilience
Cyber threats are evolving, and the industry is fighting back with AI-powered defenses, strategic alliances, and enhanced resilience measures. Here’s what we’ve seen over the past month that’s captured our attention:
Quick Take: NTT DATA & Palo Alto Networks Partner on Private 5G Security
NTT DATA recently announced a new managed security service powered by Palo Alto Networks. The service enhances security for industrial and operational technology (OT) environments by integrating Palo Alto Networks’ cybersecurity solutions with NTT DATA’s Private 5G architecture.
Research Note: Rubrik Expanded Cyber-Resilience Capabilities
Rubrik recently announced new cyber-resilience features to strengthen data protection across public cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments. The latest enhancements focus on threat detection, data protection, identity recovery, and automated recovery processes to mitigate cyberattack risks.
Research Note: Check Point & Wiz Enter Strategic Partnership
Wiz and Check Point recently announced a strategic partnership to integrate cloud network security with cloud-native application protection. The collaboration will merge Check Point’s AI-driven cloud security and networking capabilities with Wiz’s Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP).
NAND Insider Newsletter: March 3, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, March 3, 2025.
Research Note: NVIDIA & Cisco Partner on Spectrum-X
Cisco and NVIDIA announced an expanded partnership to unify AI data center networking by integrating Cisco Silicon One with NVIDIA Spectrum-X.
The companies will create a joint architecture that supports high-performance, low-latency AI workloads across enterprise and cloud environments.
Quick Take: Ambient IoT Alliance
The newly launched Ambient IoT Alliance aims to develop and promote a global ecosystem for ambient IoT, which refers to battery-free, energy-harvesting devices that seamlessly connect to existing wireless networks. These devices can track real-time data such as location, temperature, humidity, and more—all without requiring traditional power sources.
Research Note: IBM to Acquire DataStax
IBM recently announced its intent to acquire DataStax, which specializes in NoSQL and vector database solutions built on Apache Cassandra.
The acquisition aligns with IBM’s broader strategy to enhance its watsonx enterprise AI stack by integrating advanced data management capabilities, particularly for handling unstructured and semi-structured data.
Research Note: OpenText Core Threat Detection & Response
OpenText recently announced its new Core Threat Detection and Response, an AI-driven cybersecurity solution that will become generally available with its Cloud Editions 25.2.
The new platform integrates with Microsoft security tools, including Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Entra ID, and Microsoft Security Copilot, to enhance threat detection and response capabilities.
The solution operates as an Open XDR (Extended Detection and Response) platform, enabling enterprises to integrate telemetry from multiple security tools and applications.
Research Note: IBM Granite 3.2 Models
IBM recently introduced Granite 3.2, bringing significant new capabilities to its AI model lineup that brings enhanced reasoning, multimodal capabilities, improved forecasting, and more efficient safety models.
Research Note: WEKA & HPE Set SpecStorage Records
WEKA and HPE recently announced record-breaking results across all five benchmark workloads in the SPECstorage Solution 2020 suite. The results were achieved using the WEKA Data Platform on the HPE Alletra Storage Server 4110, powered by Intel Xeon processors.
The results show the system’s ability to handle data-intensive workloads, including AI, genomics, software development, and video analytics, with high efficiency and low latency.
NAND Insider Newsletter: February 17, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers taking a look at what’s driving the week, and what happened last week that caught our attention. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, February 17, 2025.
Research Note: HPE ProLiant Gen12 Servers
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) recently introduced eight new ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers for enhanced security, performance optimization, and AI-powered management. These servers will feature the upcoming Intel Xeon 6 processors and are built for data centers and edge environments.
Research Note: SAP Business Data Cloud & Databricks Partnership
SAP recently announced SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC), a fully managed SaaS platform that unifies SAP and third-party data while embedding AI-driven analytics and governance capabilities.
The new solution expands upon SAP Datasphere and integrates with Databricks’ Lakehouse technology to improve data unification, AI adoption, and advanced analytics.
Research Note: Deloitte & May Mobility Partner on Transparent Autonomous Vehicle Safety
Deloitte and May Mobility recently announced a strategic partnership to improve safety in autonomous transportation through data analytics. By combining Deloitte’s expertise in data analysis with May Mobility’s autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, the two companies will track safety events, provide actionable insights, and help cities and businesses optimize their AV systems.
Research Note: Palo Alto Networks Cortex Cloud
Palo Alto Networks recently introduced Cortex Cloud, its integrated cloud security and security operations (SecOps) platform that consolidates the capabilities of Prisma Cloud and Cortex CDR.
The new platform provides a unified approach to managing cloud security risks, real-time threat prevention, and automated response workflows.
Quick Take: CQ4’24 Cloud Earnings
The top three US public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — each reported strong but slightly decelerating growth for calendar Q4 2024. The increasing importance of AI workloads, rising capital expenditures, and shifts in customer spending patterns all impacted earnings and guidance for the quarter.
Research Note: Delinea Platform Enhancements
Delinea recently introduced new features to its cloud-native identity security platform, focusing on centralized identity lifecycle management, credential security, and behavioral analytics.
The updates give enterprises enhanced visibility, automation, and security control over human and non-human identities. They also include mobile access via the new Delinea Platform App, which supports remote identity and access management (IAM).
NAND Insider Newsletter: February 10, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, February 10, 2025.
Research Note: Databricks Acquires BladeBridge
Databricks announced the acquisition of BladeBridge, a provider of AI-powered migration solutions, to facilitate the transition of enterprise data warehouses to Databricks SQL (DBSQL).
BladeBridge automates the migration of workloads from over 20 different data warehouses and ETL platforms, using large language models for code analysis, conversion, and validation.
Research Note: NetApp’s New ASA + Realtime Malware Detection for Block Storage
NetApp announced a major expansion of its all-flash SAN (ASA) product line while also introducing new ransomware protection capabilities advancements.
Research Note: Pure Storage Revamps Reseller Partner Program
Pure Storage recently announced an update to its Reseller Partner Program, introducing new incentives, training, and automation capabilities to drive greater partner engagement and accelerate the adoption of all-flash solutions.
Research Note: CyberArk/SentinelOne Partnership
CyberArk and SentinelOne have formed a strategic partnership to integrate CyberArk’s Endpoint Privilege Manager (EPM) with SentinelOne’s Singularity XDR platform.
The collaboration enhances endpoint security by combining privilege management with advanced threat detection and response capabilities.
Research Report: Understanding VMware Alternatives
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has left a lasting impact on the enterprise IT landscape. Promising simplification, Broadcom’s licensing and bundling changes have instead created confusion, increased costs, and led to widespread dissatisfaction among VMware customers. Many of these customers are actively exploring alternatives, driven by frustration and the need to future-proof their IT environments. This Research Report takes a look at how to best approach looking for a VMware alternative.
NAND Insider Newsletter: February 4, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is a excerpt from this week’s, February 4, 2025.
Oracle Database@Google Cloud Enhancements & Expanded Availability
Oracle and Google Cloud announced a significant expansion of Oracle Database@Google Cloud, introducing eight new regions and enhanced capabilities aimed at bolstering database resiliency, optimizing costs, and increasing operational flexibility.
Infrastructure News Roundup: January 2025
January isn’t usually a big month for announcements related to enterprise infrastructure, but then this isn’t a normal January. Let’s look at what happened.
Research Note: ServiceNow Unveils New AI Agent Capabilities
ServiceNow announced the expansion of its agentic AI capabilities by introducing the AI Agent Orchestrator and AI Agent Studio. The new capabilities provide centralized coordination of AI agents within enterprise workflows, integrating with the ServiceNow Platform to improve automation and task execution across IT, HR, customer service, and other business functions.
Research Note: Kioxia’s Open Source AiSAQ ANN Search
Today, Kioxia announced the open-source release of All-in-Storage ANNS with Product Quantization (AiSAQ), an approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) technology optimized for SSD-based storage. AiSAQ enables large-scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads by offloading vector data from DRAM to SSDs, significantly reducing memory requirements.
NAND Insider Newsletter: January 28, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is a excerpt from this week’s.
Research Note: Komprise PII Protection Capabilities
Komprise recently introduced new capabilities in its Smart Data Workflow Manager, enhancing its ability to detect and protect personally identifiable information (PII) within unstructured data environments.
The enhanced features are currently in early access and are expected to be generally available by the end of Q1 2025 as part of the Komprise Intelligent Data Management Platform.
Research Note: Cisco AI Defense
Cisco recently introduced its Cisco AI Defense, its new enterprise security solution to address the growing risks associated with AI adoption in multi-cloud and multi-model environments.
Research Note: DeepSeek’s Impact on IT Infrastructure Market
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek recently introduced an AI model, DeepSeek-R1l that the company claims that it matches or surpasses models from industry. The move created significant buzz in the AI industry. Though the claims remain unverified, the potential to democratize AI training and fundamentally alter industry dynamics is clear.
The AI Debate at Davos: Concerns and Controversies Surrounding Stargate
The annual World Economic Forum in Davos is known for sparking high-profile discussions on global challenges, and this year was no exception. Against the backdrop of the recently announced $500 billion Stargate Project — an ambitious AI infrastructure initiative led by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle—prominent figures in artificial intelligence (AI) raised concerns about the future of the technology and its societal implications.
Meta’s AI Ambitions in the Wake of Stargate
As the tech world buzzes about Project Stargate, Meta has quietly, but assertively, announced its own transformative AI initiatives. While the $500 billion Stargate Project promises to build exclusive, centralized AI infrastructure for OpenAI, Meta is charting a different course. With a focus on scalability, accessibility, and open-source innovation, Meta’s AI moves reflect a strategic vision that balances ambition with practicality.
Research Note: The Stargate Project
The Stargate Project, announced at a political event on January 25, 2025, is a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX that will invest up to $500 billion by 2030 to develop AI infrastructure across the United States.
NAND Insider Newsletter: January 21, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is an excerpt from this week’s.
Research Note: IBM Consulting Acquires Oracle Specialist AST
IBM announced that it intends to acquire Applications Software Technology(AST), a leading global Oracle consultancy. AST specializes in delivering digital transformation solutions via Oracle Cloud Applications, with a focus on the public sector, including local governments and K-12 education.
Research Note: ServiceNow to Acquire Conversation Data Analysis Company Cuein
ServiceNow has entered into an agreement to acquire Cuein, a company specializing in AI-native conversation data analysis and insights. This acquisition bolsters ServiceNow’s strategic focus on Agentic AI—autonomous AI agents capable of processing data, making decisions, and executing tasks across enterprise workflows.
Research Note: Lenovo to Acquire Infinidat, Grow into High-End Storage
In a surprise move, Lenovo has announced its intention to acquire Infinidat, a privately held enterprise storage company specializing in scalable, high-performance, and cyber-resilient storage solutions.
Financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed. This acquisition marks Lenovo’s strategic entry into the high-end enterprise storage market, complementing its existing portfolio, which primarily focuses on entry and mid-range storage solutions.
The deal is expected to close sometime in 2H calendar 2025.
Quick Take: CoreWeave & IBM Partner on NVIDIA Grace Blackwell Supercomputing
IBM and CoreWeave, a leading AI specialty AI cloud provider, together announced a collaboration to deliver one of the first NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip-enabled AI supercomputers to market.
Research Note: UALink Consortium Expands Board, adds Apple, Alibaba Cloud & Synopsys
The Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium (UALink), an industry organization taking a collaborative approach to advance high-speed interconnect standards for next-generation AI workloads, announced an expansion to its Board of Directors, welcoming Alibaba Cloud, Apple, and Synopsys – joining existing member companies like AMD, AWS, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft.
Research Note: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine
Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Engine, a tailored version of its OpenShift orchestration platform for virtualization workloads.
The new offering utilizes the open-source KVM hypervisor and can run on-premises hardware with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and bare-metal cloud services.
NAND Insider Newsletter: January 12, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is a excerpt from this week’s.
Quick Take: Datadog Acquires Log Search Provider Quickwit
Datadog announced the acquisition of Quickwit, a cutting-edge provider of search and indexing software for petabyte-scale log datasets. The acquisition should enhance Datadog’s capabilities in observability, security, and data analytics by integrating Quickwit’s cost-efficient, high-performance search technology into its product suite.
Research Note: Oracle Exadata X11M
Oracle recently launched of its latest Exadata platform, the Oracle Exadata X11M. Purpose-built to optimize the performance of Oracle Database, including Oracle Autonomous Database, X11M is a significant leap forward in speed and efficiency compared to previous generation Exadata systems for cloud, multi-cloud, and customer data centers.
NAND Insider Newsletter: January 5, 2025
Every week NAND Research puts out a newsletter for our industry customers. Below is a excerpt from this week’s.
Research Note: Marvell Custom HBM for Cloud AI
Marvell recently announced a new custom high-bandwidth memory (HBM) compute architecture that addresses the scaling challenges of XPUs in AI workloads. The new architecture enables higher compute and memory density, reduced power consumption, and lower TCO for custom XPUs.
Research Note: Enfabrica ACF-S Millennium
First detailed at Hot Chips 2024, Enbrica recently announced that its ACF-S “Millennium” chip, which addresses the limitations of traditional networking hardware for AI and accelerated computing workloads, will be available to customers in calendar Q1 2025.
Research Note: Cohesity & Veritas Complete Merger
Cohesity completed its long-awaited merger with Veritas’ enterprise data protection business. The combined entity, valued at $7 billion, now serves 12,000 customers globally and generates $1.5 billion in ARR.
Research Note: Dell AI Products & Services Updates
Dell Technologies has made significant additions to its AI portfolio with its recent announcements at SC24 and Microsoft Ignite 2024 in November. The announcements span infrastructure, ecosystem partnerships, and professional services, targeting accelerated AI adoption, operational efficiency, and sustainability in enterprise environments.
Understanding AI Data Types: The Foundation of Efficient AI Models
AI Datatypes aren’t just a technical detail—it’s a critical factor that affects performance, accuracy, power efficiency, and even the feasibility of deploying AI models.
Understanding the datatypes used in AI isn’t just for hands-on practitioners, you often see published benchmarks and other performance numbers broken out by datatype (just look at an NVIDIA GPU data sheet). What’s it all mean?
Research Note: AWS Trainium2
Tranium is AWS’s machine learning accelerator, and this week at its re:Invent event in Las Vegas, it announced the second generation, the cleverly named Trainium2, purpose-built to enhance the training of large-scale AI models, including foundation models and large language models.
Quick Take: AWS re:Invent AI Services & Infrastructure Announcement Wrap-Up
AWS has made close to 50 announcements in the first 2 days of re:Invent. This blog takes a look at the most interesting AI services & infrastructure related ones.
Quick Take: AWS re:Invent Day 1
AWS unveiled a range of new features and services, reflecting its continued focus on innovation across generative AI, compute, and storage. These announcements include enhancements to Amazon Bedrock for improved testing and data integration, new capabilities for the generative AI assistant Amazon Q, high-performance storage-optimized EC2 instances, and advanced storage solutions like intelligent tiering and a dedicated data transfer terminal
Research Note: Hammerspace Global Data Platform v5.1 with Tier 0
Hammerspace recently announced the version 5.1 release of its Hammerspace Global Data Platform. The flagship feature of the release its new Tier 0 storage capability, which takes unused local NVMe storage on a GPU server and uses it as part of the global shared filesystem. This provides higher-performance storage for the GPU server than can be delivered from remote storage nodes – ideal for AI and GPU-centric workloads.