Research Reports

Research Report: Understanding VMware Alternatives

Steve McDowell February 6, 2025

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has left a lasting impact on the enterprise IT landscape. Promising simplification, Broadcom’s licensing and bundling changes have instead created confusion, increased costs, and led to widespread dissatisfaction among VMware customers. Many of these customers are actively exploring alternatives, driven by frustration and the need to future-proof their IT environments. This Research Report takes a look at how to best approach looking for a VMware alternative.

Research Brief: Cloudian Tackles AI Storage Complexity with NVIDIA GPUDirect for Object Storage

Steve McDowell November 18, 2024

Cloudian’s new HyperStore with NVIDIA GPUDirect for Object Storage is a significant step forward in high-performance data management. The seamless integration of GPUDirect with HyperStore allows users to benefit from Cloudian’s scalability and ease of use while enabling a dedicated high-performance data path for GPU workloads.

Research Report: Solving AI Data Pipeline Inefficiencies, the VAST Data Way

Steve McDowell July 31, 2024

While AI is foundational to the next wave of digital transformation, traditional data and storage infrastructure -even many parallel file systems- isn’t prepared for the demands required to support today’s AI lifecycle, which places unprecedented demands on storage and data infrastructure.

Developing an effective data infrastructure for AI requires a holistic approach, considering data, database, processing, and storage as a unified entity. This is how VAST Data approaches the challenge.

Research Brief: Oracle Exadata on Exascale Infrastructure

Steve McDowell July 29, 2024

Oracle announced the general availability of the Oracle Exadata Database Service on Exascale Infrastructure, offering extreme performance, reliability, availability, and security for Oracle Database workloads. This new infrastructure is now available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), catering to any workload size for all Oracle Database customers.

Research Report: Impact of Storage Architecture on the AI Lifecycle

Steve McDowell July 28, 2024

Traditional storage solutions, whether on-premises or in the cloud, often fail to meet the varying needs of each phase of the AI lifecycle. These legacy approaches are particularly ill-suited for the demands of distributed training, where keeping an expensive AI training cluster idle has a real economic impact on the enterprise.

Research Brief: Oracle HeatWave GenAI

Steve McDowell June 30, 2024

Oracle HeatWave GenAI is now generally available. The release features the industry’s first in-database large language models (LLMs), automated vector store, scale-out vector processing, and natural language conversations informed by unstructured content.