NetApp has announced enhancements to its enterprise-grade data platform, enabling businesses to remove barriers to AI innovation. In addition to supporting the latest NVIDIA innovations announced at GTC, NetApp is launching the NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE), an advanced, secure, and unified AI data platform co-designed with NVIDIA and integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.
A fundamental challenge for AI is to enable companies to discover, understand and manage the data they have in their global environments. If data is the fuel of AI, finding and using the best data is essential to creating truly transformative AI. In this context, having an appropriate platform is key to maximizing the value of data.
Rich metadata
NetApp AIDE, as an intelligent platform, helps companies solve this need through an automatically created and continuously updated global catalog of metadata, with powerful search capabilities. It is important to highlight that the metadata catalog of this platform goes beyond the standard file system metadata and actively analyzes its content to semantically enrich the information in situ, avoiding security risks and additional costs derived from the constant movement of data. This rich metadata allows companies to find, select, use and manage information more efficiently within the platform, thus feeding the entire AI data lifecycle.
“Despite massive investments and market pressures to leverage AI to improve productivity and business decision-making, data challenges are holding back projects before they even reach production,” said Syam Nair, chief product officer at NetApp. “To regain control of their data, customers need a mature enterprise-grade data platform, designed from the ground up to be disaggregated and intelligent, so that storage, services and control scale independently without lock-in to a single vendor. Leveraging the NetApp data platform, including NetApp AIDE and support for NVIDIA’s leading AI capabilities, we are helping organizations create enterprise-grade AI factories backed by our unified storage platform. high performance.”
Integration with on-premises and cloud ISV partners
NetApp AIDE launches this month to a first group of early adopters and partners, and will be widely available in early summer. As a strong supporter of open technology ecosystems, NetApp will continue to offer integrations with numerous ISV partners, both on-premises and in the cloud, relying on an open platform that facilitates complete and seamless integrations, essential for customers to launch AI workloads in production.
Examples of these integrations include leading AI application development platforms and frameworks based on hyperscale cloud services, such as AI applications on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, and LangChain. All of this enables organizations to quickly build AI applications that securely leverage their unstructured business data within an AI-ready platform.
Hybrid cloud support
In the coming months, NetApp AIDE will expand to support an increasing number of deployment options, strengthening its focus as a flexible platform. AIDE is an integrated set of software solutions that customers will be able to run on various server options to best suit their needs. For example, businesses will be able to use this platform across their entire data environment with the new NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. Additionally, the platform will be expanded to support deployments on a wide variety of NetApp storage systems, including AFF A-Series, AFF C-Series, and FAS.
Additionally, this summer, NetApp AIDE will add new capabilities that will further strengthen the value of the platform. Hybrid cloud support will bring the platform’s capabilities to enterprise data, regardless of where it resides. It will also evolve to include multimodal data capabilities, expanding the platform’s reach to visual data and opening the door to new use cases. On the other hand, integration with agent-based AI will enable secure and controlled workflows within the platform, compatible with industry standard protocols.
“Through our collaboration, NetApp and Cisco deliver enterprise-grade infrastructure that accelerates AI adoption,” said Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Compute. “FlexPod AI brings together a complete set of capabilities that, together with the NetApp AIDE platform, allows you to bring AI directly to the data, accelerating the flow of information and generating value faster.”
NetApp will continue to offer integrations with numerous ISV partners, both on-premises and in the cloud
To further strengthen its data platform’s ability to drive AI innovation, NetApp will support NVIDIA STX, a rack-scale modular storage reference architecture for agent-based AI. This integration will allow the platform to offer a high-performance data engine with specialized memory for KV-cache storage, improving energy efficiency, performance and security. Using the data management capabilities of the NetApp platform, businesses will be able to bridge the gap between AI-intensive computing and unstructured data storage.
“The demand for AI factories is driving companies to look for new ways to manage and leverage their data to generate business value,” said Jason Hardy, vice president of storage technologies at NVIDIA. “By integrating with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference architecture, NetApp provides a framework to efficiently manage data in large-scale AI deployments.”
