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Quick Take: UALink & OCP Join Forces

The Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation and the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium have announced a strategic collaboration to standardize and deploy high-performance, open scale-up interconnects for next-generation AI and HPC clusters.

Research Note: IBM Orchestrate for Enterprise Agentic AI

IBM watsonx Orchestrate

At IBM Think 2025 in Boston, IBM announced its new watsonx Orchestrate, catching the shift that sees enterprise AI moving beyond simple model deployment toward agent orchestration.

The platform enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage AI agents across enterprise environments with minimal technical expertise required.

Research Note: Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS for AI Protection

Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS

At RSAC 2025, Palo Alto Networks launched its new Prisma AIRS (AI Security), a comprehensive security platform targeting threats across enterprise AI ecosystems. Building upon their “Secure AI by Design” portfolio introduced last year, Prisma AIRS addresses emerging security challenges posed by the proliferation of AI applications, agents, and models.

Quick Take: Palo Alto Networks to Acquire Protect AI

Deal

Today, Palo Alto Networks announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Protect AI, which secures AI and ML applications. The deal is part of Palo Alto Networks’ broader strategy to expand its cybersecurity portfolio into AI risk management.

Research Note: Veeam’s VeeamOn Announcements

Veeam

At its annual VeeamON 2025 event, Veeam Software announced three significant expansions to its data resilience platform. The updates focus on identity protection, AI integration, and security partnerships.

Research Note: VMware Tanzu’s AI Makeover

VMware Tanzu AI

Broadcom’s VMware is repositioning Tanzu from a Kubernetes-centric application platform to a GenAI-first PaaS. The latest release introduces support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) for agentic AI, deepens integration with the Claude LLM, and introduces a rearchitected platform focused on private cloud AI workloads.

Research Note: Fortanix Armet AI Public Preview

Fortanix Armet AI

Fortanix recently launched a public preview of Armet AI, a turnkey generative AI platform that integrates confidential computing and enterprise-grade data governance.

Targeted at enterprises managing sensitive or regulated data, Armet AI addresses the challenges of building secure and compliant generative AI systems by combining Intel’s trusted execution environments (SGX, TDX) with fine-grained access control, policy enforcement, and AI-specific security mechanisms.

Research Note: NetApp Updates Google NetApp Cloud Volumes

NetApp Logo

At the recent Google Cloud Next event, NetApp and Google Cloud announced enhancements to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, their fully managed file storage service. The updates focus on increasing scalability, performance, and integration capabilities while reducing complexity for enterprise workloads.

Key improvements include throughput increases to 30GiBps for Premium and Extreme service levels, independent scaling of capacity and performance for the Flex service level, integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Platform, and support for Google Cloud Assured Workloads.

Research Note: UALink Consortium Releases UALink 1.0

UALink

The UALink Consortium recently released its Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) 1.0 specification. This industry-backed standard challenges the dominance of NVIDIA’s proprietary NVLink/NVSwitch memory fabric with an open alternative for high-performance accelerator interconnect technology.

Research Note: Hammerspace $100M Series B to Accelerate AI Infrastructure Growth

Hammerspace

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.

OFC 2025: Optical Interconnects Take Center Stage in the AI-First Data Center

OFC 2025

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.

Research Note: Rubrik Expands Annapurna to GCP

Rubrik Annapurna

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

Deal

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.

Quick Take: Qualcomm Acquires VinAI’s MovianAI Division

Deal

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: Lenovo AI Announcements @ GTC 2025

Lenovo logo

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.

Research Note: NetApp AI Data Announcements @ GTC 2025

NetApp

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

IT Engineers

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

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: 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.

Liquid Cooling is Front & Center at GTC 2025

Heatwave

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: HPE Storage Enhancements for AI

HPE AI Storage

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

NVIDIA GTC 2025 Storage

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.

Research Note: VDURA V5000 All-Flash AI Storage Appliance

VDURA Architecture

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 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.

Research Note: Couchbase Edge Server for Offline-First Data Processing

Couchbase Edge Server

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

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

Deal

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.

Research Note: NVIDIA & Cisco Partner on Spectrum-X

NVIDIA 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.

Research Note: IBM to Acquire DataStax

Deal

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: IBM Granite 3.2 Models

IBM sign

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

Data Center

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.

Infrastructure News Roundup: January 2025

Datacenter

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: Kioxia’s Open Source AiSAQ ANN Search

Kioxia RAG SSD

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.

Research Note: DeepSeek’s Impact on IT Infrastructure Market

DeepSeek

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

World Economic Forum

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

Meta AI

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

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.

Research Note: UALink Consortium Expands Board, adds Apple, Alibaba Cloud & Synopsys

UALink

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.

CES 2025- Must See Tech

CES 2025

Can you believe it? The Consumer Electronics Show, aka CES, is just days away. I know, the timing is hard for all of us considering there hasn’t been much time to recover from our New Years festivities. No rest for the weary as we head out to Vegas for the big event.  

The show is always full of surprises, so stay tuned next week for lots of announcements to hit the wire. In the meantime, I have a few thoughts to share on what I will be looking for at the show.

Research Note: Marvell Custom HBM for Cloud AI

Marvell Custom HBM

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

Enfabrica ACS-F 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: Dell AI Products & Services Updates

Dell AI

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

IT Ops

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

AWS

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 Day 1

AWS

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 Architecture

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.

Quick Take: Snowflake Acquires Datavolo

Deal

Snowflake recently announced its acquisition of Datavolo, a data pipeline management company, to enhance its capabilities in automating data flows across enterprise environments.

Research Note: NVIDIA SC24 Announcements

NVIDIA Infrastructure

At the recent Supercomputing 2024 (SC24) conference in Atlanta, NVIDIA announced new hardware and software capabilities to enhance AI and HPC capabilities. This includes the new GB200 NVL4 Superchip, the general available of its H200 NVL PCIe, and several new software capabilities.

Are IT Organizations Ready for the GenAI Revolution? Let’s Ask.

Survey Says

Over the past few months, we’ve seen surveys published by tech companies across the spectrum that show us how gen AI is forcing IT organizations to assess their readiness for its adoption and deployment. The surveys offer a comprehensive view of the industry’s current stance, showing enthusiasm balanced by caution around organizational and infrastructure challenges.

Let’s examine recent surveys from the tech industry itself to see what they say about IT’s readiness to tackle the challenges of generative AI.

Research Note: Minio AIStor Object Storage

Minio AIStor

MinIO recently introduced AIStor, its new object storage solution designed for AI/ML workloads. AIStor leverages insights from large-scale customer environments, some exceeding 1 EiB of data, to address the unique challenges of managing and scaling data infrastructure for AI applications.

Research Note: Red Hat Acquires Neural Magic

Deal

Red Hat announced a definitive agreement to acquire Neural Magic, an AI company specializing in software solutions to optimize generative AI inference workloads. The acquisition supports Red Hat’s strategy of advancing open-source AI technologies deployed across various environments within hybrid cloud infrastructures.

Research Note: Nutanix Enterprise AI

Nutanix Enterprise AI

Nutanix recently introduced Nutanix Enterprise AI, its new cloud-native infrastructure platform that streamlines the deployment and operation of AI workloads across various environments, including edge locations, private data centers, and public cloud services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Quick Take: AMD Data Center Group Earnings – Q3 2024

AMD Q3 2024 Earnings

AMD this week announced significant revenue and earnings growth in Q3 2024, driven primarily by exceptional performance in the Data Center segment. AMD’s Data Center revenue increased by 122% year-over-year, reaching a record $3.5 billion and marking over half of AMD’s total revenue this quarter. CEO Lisa Su, on the earnings call, attributed this growth to the success of the EPYC CPUs and MI300X GPUs, which experienced strong adoption across cloud, enterprise, and AI applications.

Research Note: WEKA’s New WEKApod Nitro & Extreme

WEKA GenAI Pipeline

WEKA this week expanded its footprint in the AI data infrastructure space with the release of two new data platform appliances designed to meet diverse AI deployment needs.

The new products, WEKApod Nitro and WEKApod Prime, are WEKA’s latest offerings for high-performance data solutions that support accelerated AI model training, high-throughput workloads, and enterprise AI demands. The new solutions address the rapid growth of generative AI, LLMs, and RAG and fine-tuning pipelines across industries.

Research Note: IBM Granite 3.0 Models

Image of IBM Watsonx Logos

IBM recently released Granite 3.0, its third generation of LLMs, designed to balance performance with safety, speed, and cost-efficiency for enterprise use. Its flagship model, Granite 3.0 8B Instruct, is a dense, instruction-tuned LLM optimized for enterprise tasks, trained on 12 trillion tokens across multiple languages and programming languages.

Research Note: Google Cloud Database & Related GenAI Announcements

Google Cloud

Google Cloud recently announced a series of significant upgrades to its database solutions, emphasizing its commitment to supporting enterprise generative AI (gen AI) applications. The new capabilities focus on enhancing developer tools, simplifying database management, and modernizing database infrastructure.

OCP Global Summit 2024: Key Announcements

OCP 2024 Announcements

At the recent OCP Global Summit 2024, the organization unveiled several major initiatives highlighting OCP’s commitment to driving innovation and fostering collaboration in the tech ecosystem. This includes expanding its AI Strategic Initiative with contributions from NVIDIA and Meta, new alliances for sustainability and standardization, and the launch of an open chiplet marketplace.

Research Note: Dell AI Portfolio Updates

Dell AI

Dell Technologies made significant strides in AI infrastructure with its Integrated Rack 7000 (IR7000) launch and associated platforms for AI and HPC. The announcements introduce enhancements in computing density, power efficiency, and data management, catering specifically to AI workloads.

Quick Take: Cisco’s Investment in CoreWeave and its AI Infrastructure Strategy

Deal

Cisco is reportedly on the verge of investing in CoreWeave, one of the hottest neo-cloud providers specializing in AI infrastructure, in a transaction valuing the GPU cloud provider at $23 billion. CoreWeave has rapidly scaled its AI capabilities by utilizing NVIDIA GPUs for data centers, becoming a key player in the AI infrastructure market.

Research Note: VAST Data’s New AI Updates & Partnerships

Logo for the VAST Data Platform.

VAST made a wide-ranging set of AI-focused announcements that extend it’s already impressive feature set to directly address the needs of enterprise AI. Beyond the new features, VAST also highlighted new strategic relationships and a new user community that help bring VAST technology into the enterprise.

AMD MI300 Gains Momentum with New Vultr & Oracle Cloud Wins

AMD MI300x

The AMD MI300’s advanced architecture, featuring high memory capacity, low power consumption, and solid performance, is finding a home among cloud providers. While Microsoft Azure previously announced MI300-based instances, there are new announcements from specialty GPU cloud provider Vultr and the mainstream CSP Oracle Cloud Infrastructure of new integrations with AMD’s MI300 accelerator.

Research Note: NetApp’s New AI Vision

NetApp

At its recent Insight customer event, NetApp shared its vision for how its solutions will evolve to address these challenges. NetApp’s approach combines its existing ONTAP-based products with a new disaggregated architecture and new data manipulation capabilities that promise to deliver the efficiencies demanded by enterprise AI.

In Conversation: NetApp’s Intelligent Data Infrastructure

NetApp Intelligent Data Infrastructure Video

Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to talk with NetApp CMO Gabie Boko and NetApp VP of Product Marketing Jeff Baxter in a wide-ranging conversation about the power of data infrastructure, which extends well beyond simple enterprise storage.

As NetApp Insight, its premier customer event, kicks off this week in Las Vegas, I thought we’d revisit the discussion, as it provides nice context for what the company is expected to announce this week.

Research Note: NetApp & AWS Expand Strategic Collaboration Agreement

Deal

NetApp recently announced the expansion of its long-standing partnership with Amazon Web Services. The new Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) strengthens the relationship between the two companies, paving the way for enhanced generative AI capabilities and streamlined CloudOps for joint customers.

Research Note: IBM Boosts Oracle Consulting with Accelalpha Acquisition & Consulting Expansion

IBM sign

IBM recently announced its intent to acquire Accelalpha, a global provider of Oracle Cloud consulting services, as part of its strategy to expand its Oracle consulting expertise and enhance its broader consulting capabilities. Accelalpha’s specialized knowledge in supply chain, logistics, finance, and enterprise performance management bolsters IBM’s ability to help clients accelerate their digital transformations.

Quick Take: Intel Gaudi 3 on IBM Cloud

Intel Gaudi 3

IBM and Intel announced a partnership to integrate Intel’s Gaudi 3 AI accelerators into IBM Cloud, which will be available in early 2025. This collaboration aims to enhance the scalability and affordability of enterprise AI, focusing on performance, security, and energy efficiency. IBM Cloud will be the first cloud provider to offer Gaudi 3, which […]

Research Note: The Hammerspace Appliance

Hammerspace

Hammerspace recently expanded its offerings by introducing a new line of appliances. Delivering Hammerspace’s data management technology as an appliance simplifies deployment and streamlines the process of purchasing and configuring its solutions.

Research Note: GenAI Enhancements to Oracle Autonomous Database

Oracle SIgn

Oracle recently introduced significant Generative AI enhancements to its Autonomous Database to simplify the development of AI-driven applications at enterprise scale. The enhancements leverage Oracle Database 23ai technology to empower organizations with tools that make integrating AI, streamlining data workflows easier, and modernizing application development.

JFrog Introduces Comprehensive Runtime Security Solution & Nvidia Integration

JFrog

Announced this week at its annual swampUp event, the new JFrog Runtime is a robust runtime security solution that offers end-to-end protection for applications throughout their lifecycle. Alongside this launch, JFrog also revealed a new product integration with NVIDIA, which will enable users to secure and manage AI models more effectively using NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure.

Research Note: Juniper Expands AIOps Portfolio

Juniper

Juniper Networks expanded its AI-driven networking portfolio by introducing new Ops4AI initiatives. These solutions integrate AI-driven automation and optimization to enhance network performance, particularly focusing on the growing demands of AI workloads within data centers.

Research Note: Cerebras Inference Service

Cerebras Inference

Cerebras Systems recently introduced Cerebras Inference, a high-performance AI inference service that delivers exceptional speed and affordability. The new service achieves 1,800 tokens per second for Meta’s Llama 3.1 8B model and 450 tokens per second for the 70B model, which Cerebras says makes it 20 times faster than NVIDIA GPU-based alternatives.

Research Note: HPE Q3 FY2024 Earnings

HPE FQ2'24 Earnings

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) delivered a strong Q3 FY2024 earnings report, beating Wall Street estimates with its $7.7 billion in net revenue, up 10% year over year and exceeding guidance. The company saw growth across AI systems, hybrid cloud, and networking.

Research Note: NVIDIA NIM Agent Blueprints

NVIDIA

NVIDIA launched its new NIM Agent Blueprints, a catalog of pre-trained, customizable AI workflows to help enterprise developers quickly build and deploy generative AI applications for critical use cases, such as customer service, drug discovery, and data extraction from PDFs.

Research Note: Dell Q2 FY2025 Data Center Earnings

Dell FQ2'25 Earnings

Dell Technologies’ latest earnings report paints a picture of a company amid a transformative shift, fueled by increasing demand for AI-driven solutions. In its second quarter of fiscal 2025, Dell delivered strong revenue growth, underscored by the rapid expansion of its Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) and a notable surge in AI server sales.

Research Note: IBM Telum II & Spyre AI Accelerators

IBM Telum II & Spyre

At the Hot Chips 2024 conference in Palo Alto, California, IBM unveiled the next generationj of enterprise AI solutions: the IBM Telum II processor and the IBM Spyre Accelerator. These new technologies should meet the demands of the AI era, providing enhanced performance, scalability, and AI capabilities. Both are expected to be available in 2025.

Research Note: AMD Acquires ZT Systems

Image of an AMD EPYC processor

AMD announced its strategic acquisition of ZT Systems, a specialty provider of AI and general-purpose compute infrastructure for major hyperscale companies, in a deal valued at $4.9 billion. The acquisition aligns with AMD’s AI strategy to enhance its capabilities in AI training and inferencing solutions for data centers.

Research Note: Palantir Q2 2024 Earnings

Palantir

Palantir Technologies delivered strong Q2 2024 earnings, underlining its position as a leader in enterprise AI solutions. The company’s strategic focus on moving from AI prototypes to full-scale production has driven significant growth and expanded its customer base.

Research Note: Qualcomm FQ3 2024 Earnings

Image of Qualcomm's HQ building

In its fiscal third quarter, Qualcomm demonstrated strong financial performance, driven by its continued success in diversifying its business beyond mobile handsets into sectors like automotive, IoT, and PCs. With its focus on innovation, particularly in AI and advanced computing, Qualcomm is well-positioned to sustain its leadership across various industries.

Research Report: Solving AI Data Pipeline Inefficiencies, the VAST Data Way

AI Data Pipeline

While AI is foundational to the next wave of digital transformation, traditional data and storage infrastructure -even many parallel file systems- isn’t prepared for the demands required to support today’s AI lifecycle, which places unprecedented demands on storage and data infrastructure.

Developing an effective data infrastructure for AI requires a holistic approach, considering data, database, processing, and storage as a unified entity. This is how VAST Data approaches the challenge.

Research Report: Impact of Storage Architecture on the AI Lifecycle

WEKA GenAI Pipeline

Traditional storage solutions, whether on-premises or in the cloud, often fail to meet the varying needs of each phase of the AI lifecycle. These legacy approaches are particularly ill-suited for the demands of distributed training, where keeping an expensive AI training cluster idle has a real economic impact on the enterprise.

Let OpenAI GPT-4o Mini Introduce Itself

GPT-4o mini

We usually write our own content, using LLMs to help refine our research, but in honor of OpenAI releasing its new GPT-4o Mini language model just a day after Meta released its Llama 3.1, and on the same day Mistral releases its new Mistral Large 2, we’ll let GPT 4o Mini tell you about itself.

Research Note: Meta Llama 3.1

Meta Llama 3.1

Meta recently released its new Llama 3.1 large language model, setting a new benchmark for open-source models. This latest iteration of the Llama series enhances AI capabilities while underscoring Meta’s continuing commitment to democratizing advanced technology. Along with the updated model, Meta also released a new suite of ethical AI tools.

Research Note: NVIDIA AI Factory & NIM Inference Microservices

NVIDIA

NVIDIA announced its new NVIDIA AI Foundry, a service designed to supercharge generative AI capabilities for enterprises using Meta’s just-released Llama 3.1 models, along with its new NIM Inference microservices.

The new offerings significantly advance the ability to customize and deploy AI models for domain-specific applications.

Research Note: Mistral NeMo 12B Small Language Model

Mistral AI

Mistral AI and NVIDIA launched Mistral NeMo 12B, a state-of-the-art language model for enterprise applications such as chatbots, multilingual tasks, coding, and summarization. The collaboration combines Mistral AI’s training data expertise with NVIDIA’s optimized hardware and software ecosystem, offering high performance across diverse applications.

Research Note: NetApp Updates Cloud Offerings

NetApp

NetApp announced new capabilities designed for strategic cloud workloads, including GenAI and VMware, to help reduce the resources and risks for managing these workloads in hybrid multi-cloud environments.

Research Note: AWS Updates Bedrock

AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a series of significant enhancements to its Bedrock platform aimed at bolstering the capabilities and reliability of generative AI applications. These enhancements focus on improved data connectivity, advanced safety features, and robust governance mechanisms.

Research Note: AMD Acquires Silo AI

Deal

AMD announced a definitive agreement to acquire Silo AI, Europe’s largest private AI lab, for approximately $665 million in an all-cash transaction. This acquisition aligns with AMD’s strategy to deliver end-to-end AI solutions based on open standards, enhancing its partnership with the global AI ecosystem.

Quick Take: VAST Data Platform Achieves NVIDIA Partner Network Certification

VAST

VAST Data announced that its VAST Data Platform has been certified as a high-performance storage solution for NVIDIA Partner Network cloud partners. The certification highlights VAST’s position as a leading data platform provider for AI cloud infrastructure and enhances its collaboration with NVIDIA in building next-generation AI factories.

Research Note: Lenovo AI Updates

Lenovo logo

Lenovo recently introduced new enterprise AI solutions designed to simplify AI adoption. These include turnkey services, business-ready vertical solutions, and energy-efficient innovations to accelerate practical AI applications.

Oracle Releases APEX 24.1 Low-Code Development Platform

Oracle SIgn

Oracle recently announced that its APEX 24.1 low-code development platform is now available for download. It is being rolled out globally across OCI APEX Application Development and Autonomous Database Cloud Service regions.