Research Notes

HPE Connectivity and Compute Announcements (MWC 2026)

Steve McDowell March 9, 2026

At MWC 2026, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a significant expansion of its service provider portfolio, its broadest set of announcements following its acquisition last year of Juniper Networks.

The announcements focus on three primary pillars: ultra-high-density routing for AI backbones, modular compute for the telecommunications edge, and an integrated cloud operations stack. HPE is positioning these releases to address the “bursty” and high-bandwidth nature of AI training and inference workloads that are increasingly distributed across regional data centers.

NVIDIA Strategic Investments in Optical Interconnects

Steve McDowell March 4, 2026

NVIDIA has committed over $4 billion in direct strategic investments across two optical interconnect companies, Lumentum and Coherent, supplemented by multibillion-dollar purchase agreements and equity participation in the optical startup Ayar Labs

How to Think about VAST Data

Steve McDowell February 27, 2026

If you’ve been tracking the enterprise infrastructure space for the past few years, you’ve probably encountered VAST Data. And if you’re like most IT practitioners I talk to, you’ve probably filed them in the “high-performance storage vendor” folder in your brain.

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.