NetApp introduces enterprise-grade data platform for AI

NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, has strengthened its enterprise-grade data platform for AI innovation. As the era of AI shifts from initial pilots to mission-critical agentic applications, AI-ready data on modern enterprise-grade data infrastructure delivers the results needed for AI-driven businesses, NetApp said.

To accelerate modern AI workloads, new capabilities include:

- NetApp AFX, an enterprise-grade disaggregated all-flash storage system built for demanding AI workloads. NetApp has poistioned the system as a foundation for AI factories. It is certified storage for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD supercomputing and powered by NetApp ONTAP, NetApp's storage operating system. 

AFX delivers the same robust data management and built-in cyber resilience that NetApp is known for, along with secure multitenancy and seamless integration across on-premises and cloud environments. AFX is designed for linear performance, scaling up to 128 nodes with TBps of bandwidth, exabyte-scale capacity, and independent scaling of performance and capacity.

Optional DX50 data compute nodes enable a global metadata engine.

- NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE) is a comprehensive AI data service designed to make AI simple, affordable, and secure. AIDE provides the efficiency, data clarity, and governance needed for enterprises to confidently adopt AI. From data ingestion and preparation to serving generative AI 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 synchronisation, 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 vectorisation and retrieval. 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. 

- Object application programming interface (API): 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, Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (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 then analyse data, train AI models, enable intelligent search, and build modern applications on their existing Azure NetApp Files (ANF) datasets.

- 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 for electronic design automation.

This allows for data stored in other ONTAP-based storage in customer data centres or across multiple clouds to be instantly made visible and writeable in an ANF environment, but with data transferred granularly only when requested. Basically, a customer’s entire hybrid cloud data estate can 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.

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 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 vectorisation 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.” 

NetApp's customers are testing and deploying AI to improve productivity and gain a competitive advantage, said Andrew Sotiropoulos, Senior VP and GM of NetApp Asia Pacific, observing that a constant theme is how they are shifting from passive data storage to active data management—extracting, processing, and curating data to unlock insights. 

"This evolution requires them to deploy architectures that break down silos and combine strong data and infrastructure security with fast recovery practices,” said Sotiropoulos, Senior VP and GM of NetApp Asia Pacific.

“With our latest innovations, NetApp provides a secure, unified, and future-ready environment for your data foundation across the hybrid cloud — supporting those who operationalise AI at scale to drive real business outcomes.” 

Details

Customers will be able to access these products through direct purchase, or through a subscription to NetApp Keystone storage-as-a-service (STaaS).

“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, organisations can index and search vast amounts of unstructured data across their enterprise to drive innovation and deliver real business impact."

“Today’s new solutions from NetApp demonstrate the speedy fulfillment of an ambitious vision on how to manage data for AI,” said Michael Leone, Practice Director and Principal Analyst at Omdia.

“The way NetApp solutions bring intelligence to enterprise data shows a deep understanding of customers’ real challenges and how to address them. Adding independent scaling of performance and capacity management to the robust data management capabilities in ONTAP, which has long defined NetApp's reputation, will enable enterprises to confidently invest in AI projects that deliver value quickly to the business.”