Research Notes

Research Note: Verizon Trusted Connection

Steve McDowell March 30, 2025

Earlier this month at MWC 2025, Verizon Business announced the release of its new Verizon Trusted Connection, a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Security Service Edge (SSE) platform that unifies secure connectivity and policy enforcement across enterprise devices, networks, and applications.

The new offering sees Verizon targeting midsize enterprises seeking to consolidate security and networking services under a single provider and management interface.

Research Note: Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE for 5G

Steve McDowell March 30, 2025

Earlier this month at MWC 2025, Palo Alto Networks announced the general availability of Prisma SASE 5G, its new cloud-delivered cybersecurity solution for enterprises leveraging 5G connectivity.

The offering expands the company’s SASE portfolio to provide integrated Zero Trust security for 5G-enabled infrastructure, including mobile users, IoT/OT devices, and SD-WAN endpoints.

Research Note: Lenovo AI Announcements @ GTC 2025

Steve McDowell March 26, 2025

At NVIDIA GTC 2025, Lenovo showed off its latest Hybrid AI Factory platforms in partnership with NVIDIA, focused on agentic AI.

The Lenovo Hybrid AI Advantage framework integrates a full-stack hardware and software solution, optimized for both private and public AI model deployments, and spans on-prem, edge, and cloud environments.

Research Note: NetApp AI Data Announcements @ GTC 2025

Steve McDowell March 26, 2025

At the recent GTC 2025 event, NetApp announced, in collaboration with NVIDIA, a comprehensive set of product validations, certifications, and architectural enhancements to its intelligent data products.

The announcements include NetApp’s integration with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, support for NVIDIA’s latest accelerated computing systems, and expanded availability of enterprise-grade AI infrastructure offerings, including NetApp AFF A90 and NetApp AIPod.

Research Note: WEKA Augmented Memory Grid

Steve McDowell March 24, 2025

At the recent NVIDIA GTC conference, WEKA announced the general availability of its Augmented Memory Grid, a software-defined storage extension engineered to mitigate the limitations of GPU memory during large-scale AI inferencing.

The Augmented Memory Grid is a new approach that integrates with the WEKA Data Platform and leverages NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage (GDS) to bypass CPU bottlenecks and deliver data directly to GPU memory with microsecond latency.

Research Note: IBM Content-Aware Storage for RAG AI Workflows

Steve McDowell March 23, 2025

At the recent NVIDIA GTC event, IBM announced new content-aware capabilities for its Storage Scale platform, expanding its AI infrastructure offerings to support more efficient, semantically rich data access for enterprise AI applications.