Research Notes

Cisco: Secure AI Factory Expands to the Edge with Agentic Security (GTC 2026)

Steve McDowell March 28, 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)

Steve McDowell March 28, 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)

Steve McDowell March 23, 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

Steve McDowell March 22, 2026

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.

Everpure ActiveCluster for File

Steve McDowell March 13, 2026

Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) recently announced ActiveCluster for file, extending its synchronous replication and continuous availability capabilities from block storage to file workloads. The company sees this capability as a foundational component of its Enterprise Data Cloud strategy, with general availability planned for Q2 2026.

IBM Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Reference Architecture

Steve McDowell March 13, 2026

IBM has announced the industry’s first published reference architecture for quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC), offering a technical blueprint for combining quantum processing units (QPUs) with traditional HPC infrastructure.

The framework focuses on computational problems that exceed traditional computing capabilities, particularly in molecular simulations and quantum chemistry calculations, where quantum mechanics governs system behavior.