Research Notes

Nutanix: Open-Source MCP Server Brings Governed AI Agent Automation to Cloud Platform

Steve McDowell August 23, 2026

Nutanix recently released an open-source MCP server for the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP). The server sits between AI coding assistants and agent frameworks, including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, and the Nutanix Prism Central management plane, translating natural-language requests into calls to the Prism v4 REST API. It is now available as a free download.

IBM’s Modular Cryogenic Architecture: Scaling Toward Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Steve McDowell August 20, 2026

IBM has connected two modular cryogenic cells within a single cooled environment at its Poughkeepsie, New York, facility and cooled the combined system to below 15 millikelvin, more than 100 times colder than deep space. The demonstration replaces the cylindrical dilution-refrigerator enclosures used in IBM Quantum System One with box-shaped aluminum cells that sit side by side and link via short, shielded interconnect tunnels.

Modular ModCon 2026: Impact on Qualcomm and the Broader AI Accelerator Market

Steve McDowell August 19, 2026

Modular held its ModCon 2026 developer conference in San Francisco this week, its first developer conference since Qualcomm completed its acquisition of the company earlier this summer.

The event was both a coming-out party for the newly combined organization and an early proof point for Qualcomm’s bet on buying Modular, namely that ceding control of a piece of its AI software stack to the open-source community is the fastest way to challenge NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem.

FMS 2026: AI Moving Boundaries Between Memory & Storage

Steve McDowell August 19, 2026

The recent FMS 2026 conference in Santa Clara, once organized around flash storage, now functions as an AI memory-and-data-infrastructure conference, confirming a shift that has been building over several product cycles. It’s no wonder the event changed its name from “Flash Memory Summit” to “Future of Memory and Storage.”

Dell & KIOXIA Bring 9.8PB in 2U to ObjectScale

Steve McDowell August 17, 2026

Dell Technologies and KIOXIA have paired the KIOXIA LC9 series 245.76TB NVMe SSD with the Dell PowerEdge R7725 server running Dell ObjectScale software, creating a 2U storage node with 9.83PB of raw flash capacity.

This makes ObjectScale the first object storage platform to qualify KIOXIA’s 245.76TB drive, which KIOXIA introduced in July 2025 as the industry’s highest-capacity NVMe SSD.

Dynatrace Acquires Arize: What the $915M Deal Means for AI Observability

Steve McDowell August 17, 2026

Observability leader Dynatrace announced its intent to acquire Arize, a venture-backed company specializing in AI observability and large language model evaluation, for $915 million.

Arize provides a platform for evaluating and monitoring the behavior of large language models, AI agents, and machine learning systems in production, addressing issues such as hallucination detection, output quality measurement, and behavioral drift that fall outside the scope of conventional application performance monitoring.