GTC Hitachi Vantara and Nutanix announced support for Nvidia’s new GPUs and software at GTC 2026, much like every other storage system vendor, while IBM integrated Watsonx and other offerings more tightly with GPUzilla's offerings. Seagate demonstrated a two-tier hybrid external KV Cache composed of SSDs and disk drives, as it did last year.
Think of all the storage companies as planets orbiting the vast Nvidia sun, with each one trying to get as close to Nvidia as possible to gain an advantage when selling its wares to customers.
Hitachi Vantara's Hitachi iQ is a hardware and software portfolio designed to help enterprises deploy and operate AI infrastructure, and is built on the Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) storage system. It integrates accelerated computing, networking, and storage into a validated infrastructure stack, and supports Hitachi's HMAX suite of software that brings AI to social infrastructure. Hitachi iQ now supports:
Hitachi Vantara will support Nvidia's STX reference architecture to develop AI-native storage systems running on Vera Rubin GPUs, BlueField-4 DPUs, and Spectrum-X networking, and its AI software.
The Hitachi iQ Studio software is built on Nvidia's AI Data Platform reference design and includes expanded AI blueprints and multi-agent coordination capabilities. The new blueprints introduce defined agent roles, including supervisor and worker models. Worker agents execute tasks while supervisor agents coordinate multi-agent workflows and adapt based on outcomes.
Hitachi iQ Studio also expands support for Nemotron models, large language models designed to power advanced, tool-using agentic AI systems, and introduces time machine capabilities that enable AI systems to navigate historical datasets. This time-aware intelligence strengthens explainability and supports customers that rely on long-term data patterns to inform decisions.
There is now tighter integration between Hitachi iQ Studio and Hammerspace to streamline data access for agent-driven workflows. With this expanded capability, data managed by Hammerspace can be accessed directly within Hitachi iQ Studio using Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that allows AI systems to securely connect to external data sources.
This enables customers to build AI agents in Hitachi iQ Studio that can work with and help manage their Hammerspace data environments, extending automation and insight directly to distributed data without requiring relocation. Data remains governed and protected within VSP One.
Get more information here.
IBM gave us four points about its work with Nvidia:
Nutanix announced Nutanix Agentic AI, a full-stack software solution built to help customers accelerate adoption of Agentic AI.
Thomas Cornely, EVP of Product Management at Nutanix, said in a statement: "Nutanix Agentic AI extends our AHV hypervisor, Flow Virtual Networking, Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, and Nutanix Enterprise AI to deliver a cloud operating model to enterprise AI factories, enabling infrastructure and platform teams to simply build, operate, and govern AI factories while providing Agentic AI developers with the performance and rich set of models and AI platform services they need."
Nutanix Agentic AI integrates with Nvidia AI Enterprise at the Agent Builder layer and orchestrates the Nvidia-certified ecosystem of AI factories for supported configurations. It enables customers to build, run, and protect agentic AI applications with a suite of infrastructure orchestration and security software coupled with AI platform services (PaaS) and models-as-a-service (MaaS) for data scientists and agentic AI developers.
In more detail:
Nutanix Agentic AI software comprises products that are either already generally available or currently in early access and expected to be available soon. More information about the solution can be seen here.
Seagate demonstrated its disk JBOD (Just a Box of Disks) backing up a Supermicro KV Cache-extending SSD JBOF (Just a Box of Flash) and also mentioned its NVMe-accessed disk drive idea, but not upfront, as it had at GTC 2025.
The KV Cache extension demo featured:
Seagate hybrid SSD/HDD KV Cache extension diagram - Click to enlarge
The multi-titled Vik Malyala, President and Managing Director, EMEA, and SVP, Technology and AI, at Supermicro, said: “Combining Supermicro’s JBOF flash tier and a Seagate’s hard drive tier can dramatically reduce inference costs while providing high performance.”
How so?
Seagate and Supermicro say a smart AI stack separates short-term memory (flash) from long-term memory (disk) and uses each tier for what it does best:
There is automated data placement over all tiers, with DPUs to coordinate data movement and caching across tiers, and you use less expensive flash this way, as “Hard drives deliver dramatically lower cost per GB for long-term memory.”
A chart shows a test result showing virtually no difference between the hybrid SSD/HDD cache and a local NVMe SSD in terms of time to first token.
Seagate hybrid SSD/HDD KV Cache concept trst result - Click to enlarge
Seagate says its system scales out and can accommodate updated components.
Its slide shows a jump from BlueField-3 today to BlueField-4 some time ahead, and then from SATA to NVMe-connected disk drives in the future. This contrasts with a similar demo at GTC 2025 in which it used prototype NVMe disk drives.
They are simply not needed yet, despite Seagate then pointing out that NVMe hard drives remove the need for HBAs, protocol bridges, and additional SAS infrastructure, and provide a unified NVMe architecture streamlining AI storage.
Seagate hybrid SSD/HDD KV cache extension evolution - Click to enlarge
This is a demo and there is no actual Seagate/Supermicro combined JBOF/JBOD/DPU product. If KV Cache extension becomes widespread and if NAND prices continue to become more expensive and scarce, then Seagate maybe has a way to sell HDDs into the KV Cache extension market. Full marks for trying. ®
Source: The register