NetApp strengthens its enterprise data platform with new AI-focused innovations
NetApp unveiled new products, strengthening its enterprise-grade data platform for AI innovation.
The new NetApp AFX decouples performance and capacity with a disaggregated NetApp ONTAP that runs on the new NetApp AFX 1K storage system. NetApp AI Data Engine is a secure, unified extension of ONTAP integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design that helps organizations simplify and secure the entire AI data pipeline, and managed via single, unified control plane.
Together, these capabilities unify high-performance storage and intelligent data services into a single, secure, and scalable offering that accelerates enterprise AI retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and inference across hybrid and multicloud environments.
With NetApp AFX and the NetApp AI Data Engine, the NetApp data platform is able to ensure that all applicable data is ready for AI.
“With the new NetApp AFX systems, customers now have a trusted, proven choice in on-premises enterprise storage built on a comprehensive data platform to rapidly propel AI innovation forward,” said Syam Nair, Chief Product Officer at NetApp.
“NetApp AI Data Engine enables customers to seamlessly connect their entire data estate across hybrid multicloud environments to build a unified data foundation. Enterprises can then accelerate their AI data pipelines by collapsing multiple data preparation and management steps into the integrated NetApp AI Data Engine, built with NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software complete with semantic search, data vectorization and data guardrails. The combination of NetApp AFX with AI Data Engine provides the enterprise resilience and performance, built and proven over decades by NetApp ONTAP, now in a disaggregated storage architecture, and all still built on the most secure storage on the planet,” Nair continued.
To accelerate AI workloads, NetApp introduced new capabilities including:
NetApp AFX
NetApp AFX is an enterprise-grade disaggregated all-flash storage system built for demanding AI workloads. NetApp AFX is a powerhouse data foundation for AI factories. It is certified storage for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD supercomputing and powered by NetApp ONTAP, the storage operating system trusted by tens of thousands of enterprise customers across industries to manage exabytes of data.
AFX delivers the same data management and built-in cyber resilience that NetApp is known for, along with secure multi-tenancy and seamless integration across on-premises and cloud environments. AFX is designed for linear performance scaling up to 128 nodes with TBs per second of bandwidth, exabyte-scale capacity, and independent scaling of performance and capacity. Optional DX50 data compute nodes enable a global metadata engine for a real-time catalog of enterprise data and leverage NVIDIA accelerated computing.
NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE)
NetApp AIDE is a comprehensive AI data service designed to make AI simple, affordable, and secure. From data ingestion and preparation to serving GenAI applications, AIDE offers a global, up-to-date view of a customer’s entire NetApp data estate for fast searching and curation while seamlessly connecting their data to any model or tool across on-premises and public cloud.
It automates data change detection and data synchronization, eliminating redundant copies and ensuring data is always current. Built-in guardrails follow data throughout its AI lifecycle, ensuring security and privacy. AIDE leverages the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, featuring NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including NVIDIA NIM microservices, for vectorization and retrieval, which joins advanced compression, fast semantic discovery, and secure, policy-driven workflows.
By bringing AI to data in an integrated system, AIDE provides the efficiency, data clarity, and governance needed for enterprises to confidently adopt AI. NetApp AIDE will run natively within the AFX cluster on top of the DX50 data compute nodes. Future ecosystem support includes the integration of NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers featuring RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. NetApp AIDE accelerates customers’ AI journeys with simplicity, security, and efficiency.
Object API for seamless access to Azure Data & AI Services
Customers can now access their Azure NetApp Files data through an Object REST API, available in public preview. This new capability means customers no longer need to move or copy file data into a separate object store to use it with Azure services. Instead, NFS and SMB datasets can be connected directly to Microsoft Fabric, Azure OpenAI, Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse, Azure AI Search, Azure Machine Learning, and more.
Customers can analyze data, train AI models, enable intelligent search, and build applications on their existing ANF datasets, while continuing to rely on the enterprise performance and reliability of Azure NetApp Files.
Enhanced unified global namespace in Microsoft Azure
Enterprises can now seamlessly unify their global data estate across cloud and on-premises into Microsoft Azure with new FlexCache capabilities in Azure NetApp Files. The same capability can also extend their on-premises workloads, such as Electronic Design Automation. This allows for data stored in other ONTAP-based storage in customer data centers or across multiple clouds to be instantly made visible and writeable in an ANF environment, but with data transferred granularly only when requested. This allows for a customer’s entire hybrid cloud data estate to be seamlessly accessed in Microsoft Azure.
Additionally, enterprises can migrate data and snapshots effortlessly between environments using SnapMirror, supporting hybrid use cases such as continuous backup, automated disaster recovery, and workload balancing across environments.
“Enterprises are looking for a trusted, high-performance data foundation to turn massive volumes of information into real intelligence that powers their AI journey,” said Justin Boitano, VP, Enterprise AI Products at NVIDIA.
“NetApp’s data platform has transformed into an AI-native storage platform by integrating NVIDIA accelerated computing and software, including leading AI models. With this new platform, organizations can index and search vast amounts of unstructured data across their enterprise to drive innovation and deliver real business impact,” Boitano concluded.