Research Notes

Oracle Base Database Cloud@Customer Extends Cloud Economics to Mid-Sized and Distributed Workloads

Steve McDowell July 24, 2026

Oracle recently announced Oracle Base Database Cloud@Customer, a hybrid cloud database service that extends the company’s Cloud@Customer portfolio to include mid-sized and departmental workloads. The

IBM Acquires HRL Laboratories, Adds Silicon-Spin Qubits to Its Quantum Portfolio

Steve McDowell July 23, 2026

IBM announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire HRL Laboratories, a research and development institution jointly owned by Boeing and General Motors since

AMD Launches Helios Rack-Scale Platform, MI400 Series and Strong Partnerships

Steve McDowell July 23, 2026

AMD used its Advancing AI 2026 conference in San Francisco on July 22-23 to launch a full-stack of AI infrastructure products spanning silicon, rack-scale systems, and developer software. The centerpiece is AMD Helios, the company’s first fully integrated rack-scale AI system, which combines 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs, 18 sixth-generation EPYC “Venice” CPUs, Pensando networking, and ROCm software into a single liquid-cooled rack rated at up to 2.9 exaflops of FP4 inference performance.

WEKA NeuralMesh 6 & WEKApod 3: Density, KV Cache, and AI Economics

Steve McDowell July 21, 2026

WEKA has announced two related products: NeuralMesh 6, the sixth generation of its core software platform, and WEKApod 3, a third-generation family of storage appliances built on WEKA-designed hardware.

The two announcements arrive together and are intended to be evaluated as a single system. NeuralMesh 6 remains deployable on customer-selected hardware, while WEKApod 3 is WEKA’s turnkey platform, shipping with the software preinstalled.

Why NetApp Acquired DataPelago: Nucleus and Its Enterprise AI Strategy

Steve McDowell July 17, 2026

NetApp announced the acquisition of DataPelago, a Sunnyvale, California-based startup that builds a data processing engine called Nucleus (formerly marketed as the Universal Data Processing Engine). DataPelago will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of NetApp. NetApp did not disclose the financial terms.

Cloudera and VAST Data Partner to Build an NVIDIA-Powered Enterprise AI Factory

Steve McDowell July 16, 2026

Cloudera and VAST Data have announced a strategic partnership to deliver a unified “AI factory” architecture that combines Cloudera’s containerized data services with the VAST AI Operating System.

The partnership pairs Cloudera’s lakehouse-based data engineering, governance, and AI services with VAST’s Disaggregated Shared Everything storage architecture, built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design. The joint offering addresses GPU starvation, in which expensive accelerator clusters sit idle because data pipelines cannot feed them fast enough to sustain training and inference workloads.