Research Feed: Steve McDowell
IBM & Arm: Together Extending Arm Architecture into Enterprise Computing
IBM and Arm announced a strategic partnership to support the Arm architecture on IBM’s enterprise computing platforms, IBM Z and LinuxONE. The collaboration aims to address two key enterprise needs: greater workload flexibility and infrastructure capable of handling AI- and data-heavy applications at a mission-critical level.
MLPerf Inference 6.0: Software Gains & Broadening Competition Shake Things Up
MLCommons released MLPerf Inference v6.0 results, marking what the consortium describes as the most significant update to the benchmark suite to date.
The round introduced five new workloads, including a multimodal vision-language model, a text-to-video generation benchmark, and a new interactive scenario for the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model.
From Zero Trust to Zero Assumption: The RSAC 2026 Vibe Shift
Zero Trust, as it’s been marketed for the last decade, has officially entered its “participation trophy” era.
Everpure: Evergreen//One + Everpure Data Stream for AI Infrastructure (GTC 2026)
Everpure announced two updates to its AI infrastructure platform at GTC 2026: the expansion of Evergreen//One storage-as-a-service to FlashBlade//EXA, and the beta release of Everpure Data Stream, a co-engineered data pipeline solution built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.
WEKA: NeuralMesh AIDP & STX Integration (GTC 2026)
At the recent GTC 2026, WEKA announced two major updates that enhance its position at the crossroads of AI storage and inference infrastructure. The company revealed the general availability of NeuralMesh AI Data Platform (AIDP), a ready-to-use appliance-style system based on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design
Nutanix: Full-Stack Agentic AI Platform for Enterprise AI Factories (GTC 2026)
At the recent NVIDIA GTC 2026 event, Nutanix announced Nutanix Agentic AI, a full-stack software solution designed to help enterprises build, operate, and govern AI factories at scale.
The announcement enhances Nutanix’s existing hybrid cloud platform — including its AHV hypervisor, Flow Virtual Networking, Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, and Nutanix Enterprise AI — with features specifically designed for the operational needs of production agentic AI workloads.
HPE: AI Factory & Storage Advancements (GTC 2026)
At NVIDIA GTC 2026, HPE announced a broad expansion of its portfolio, including AI factory infrastructure, supercomputing platforms, and enterprise storage. These announcements collectively strengthen HPE’s role as a comprehensive NVIDIA-aligned infrastructure provider, extending the NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio with hardware based on the Vera Rubin and Blackwell GPU architectures, new CPU compute options, updated networking, and various software and services integrations.
NetApp: Next-Generation EF-Series Arrays for AI & HPC (GTC 2026)
NetApp announced the new EF50 and EF80 all-flash block storage arrays, the latest generation of its EF-Series, at the recent NVIDIA GTC 2026. The systems replace the previous EF-Series generation with a purpose-built design aimed at AI model training, high-performance computing simulations, and high-throughput transactional databases.
Cisco: Secure AI Factory Expands to the Edge with Agentic Security (GTC 2026)
At NVIDIA GTC 2026, Cisco announced a significant expansion of its Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, broadening its validated AI infrastructure architecture from centralized data centers to enterprise and service provider edge deployments. The announcement includes hardware-accelerated security, updated switching silicon, new Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs), and a formalized multi-agent reference architecture.
Dell Technologies: AI Data Platform with NVIDIA (GTC 2026)
Dell Technologies announced a major expansion of its AI Data Platform at the recent NVIDIA GTC 2026 event. Dell’s AI Data Platform serves as the data foundation layer of its Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. The announcement highlights three new architectural pillars: Data Orchestration Engine built on Dataloop, GPU-accelerated analytics embedded directly into the data layer, and
two new high-performance storage innovations, Lightning File System and Exascale Storage.
NVIDIA STX & CMX: Infrastructure for AI Context Storage (GTC 2026)
NVIDIA announced its BlueField-4 STX reference architecture at GTC 2026, introducing a modular framework for deploying accelerated storage infrastructure optimized for agentic AI workloads. The architecture addresses a specific technical challenge: as AI systems evolve from single-turn interactions to complex, multi-step agentic workflows with context windows spanning millions of tokens, existing storage hierarchies struggle to efficiently manage the growing KV cache that stores an AI agent’s working memory.
NVIDIA GTC 2026: Infrastructure Announcements
The focus at NVIDIA GTC 2026 was on developing a unified infrastructure model that vendors are now adopting. The industry has effectively reached a stage where NVIDIA sets the architectural standard, while partners compete on how well they implement it in enterprise and service-provider environments.