NetApp has doubled down on its AI data infrastructure efforts, unveiling partnerships, sovereignty controls, and what it claims to be the “fastest storage on the planet.”
Chief among the announcements at the vendor’s Insight event in Las Vegas was Novus, a GPU-optimized storage architecture the company claims can support zettabyte-scale deployments. Built with so-called AI factories in mind, the architecture pairs metadata software Novus Data Director with its ONTAP data services to provide high utilization of hundreds of thousands of GPUs.
Designed for multi-tenant, cloud-scale deployments, NetApp’s Novus reportedly scales only the resources operators actually require for each workload, resulting in power reductions as only the information needed is fed across. On top of that, by keeping GPU utilization high, storage bottlenecks drop, with the vendor going so far as to claim the architecture can exceed 100 terabytes per second (TB/s) in scale-out throughput.
“AI factories struggle, and GPU economics collapse when data can't keep up," Syam Nair, NetApp’s CPO, said. “HPC-era storage alone cannot serve AI factory scale – the industry needs a true architecture built for it from the ground up. AI factories have long been searching for infrastructure that can scale at AI speed … We’ve just delivered the fastest storage on the planet, that is purpose-built for the AI era.”
In addition to the grandiose performance levels touted with Novus, NetApp added a series of AI-centric updates to its flagship platform.
Among them was the aptly named AI Data Engine, which is used to tap fragmented, unstructured data and make it AI-ready. Metadata discovery is set to be expanded across its enterprise data estate to “help customers discover and understand data” across disparate repositories.
Also on display in Las Vegas were hybrid multicloud-focused updates, including improved regional governance controls and fleet management. An AI-powered “ChatOps Interface” designed to replace manual workflows also debuted. NetApp said it lets enterprises manage disparate hybrid fleets through autonomous storage operations via natural language inputs.
Enhanced governance controls were also unveiled at NetApp’s event, including the new Keystone Sovereign, which provides regional and operational controls for customer data.
The capabilities covered by Keystone Sovereign are European-focused, with data residency means for data, logs, backups, and telemetry, as well as Euro-specific access/management processes.
“Data sovereignty has become a strategic requirement as organizations move beyond asking where data resides to demanding greater control over the technical and operational conditions that govern it,” NetApp Keystone VP and GM Ivan Iannaccone said.
“With NetApp Keystone Sovereign, we are helping qualified European customers address these evolving expectations with additional regional, support, access, and data-handling controls designed to build trust and keep critical data and support within defined geographic boundaries.”
It wouldn’t be a vendor event without partnership announcements, and there were plenty at NetApp Insight, the flagship of which was a team-up with Oracle that’ll see the pair launch a fully managed storage service for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
A “strategic collaboration” with Supermicro meanwhile will see the server giant’s compute and rack-scale systems paired with the NetApp Platform, while its long-standing partnership with SAP got a little deeper; the pair is set to further integrate NetApp capabilities into SAP Cloud Infrastructure.
The AI-centric product updates at the vendor’s annual showcase add to NetApp’s ongoing push to cater to growing market demand around AI infrastructure.
It’s also turned to acquisitions to fuel its AI infra drive, only last week revealing plans to acquire metadata services expert Peak:AIo, its third acquisition in as many months, with deals in place for California-based DataPelago and VMware disaster recovery and migration vendor JetStream Software.