NetApp Offers Enterprise-Grade Data Platform for AI with NVIDIA Integration

NetApp, the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, is debuting several new visionary 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 multi-cloud environments, NetApp said.

Customers will be able to access these products through direct purchase or through a subscription to NetApp Keystone STaaS. With NetApp AFX and the NetApp AI Data Engine, the NetApp data platform can ensure that all applicable data is immediately 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 dramatically 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.”

To accelerate modern AI workloads, NetApp is offering new capabilities including:

• 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. follow data throughout its AI lifecycle, ensuring security and privacy.
• Object API for seamless access to Azure data and 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.
• 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.

“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, vice president, 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."

For more information about this news, visit www.netapp.com.