NetApp unveils fastest file system on the planet with great raft of other announcements

NetApp announced Novus at its annual Insight event, claiming the file system delivers 100 TB/sec of scale-out performance for AI factories and supports hundreds of thousands of GPUs, according to Chief Product Officer Syam Nair. The initial Novus release combines Novus Data Director metadata software on qualified Supermicro servers with ONTAP data services via AFF A90 systems, and NetApp also introduced Keystone Sovereign data sovereignty controls, an updated AI Data Engine spanning ONTAP, StorageGRID and non-NetApp storage, and a conversational ChatOps interface in NetApp Console. NetApp is positioning Novus against AI factory storage suppliers DDN, Everpure, WEKA and VAST Data, days after agreeing to acquire parallel NFS software supplier Peak:AIO.

NetApp unveils fastest file system on the planet with great raft of other announcements NetApp’s new Novus is claimed to be the fastest file system on the planet, focussed on streaming huge amounts of data to GPUs for AI. It's being announced at NetApp's annual Insight event https://www.netapp.com/insight/ where NetApp is also introducing Keystone Sovereign, with new data sovereignty controls. Its AI Data Engine has been updated to expand metadata discovery across the full enterprise data estate, including NetApp ONTAP, StorageGRID, and non-NetApp storage. New hybrid multi-cloud capabilities with autonomous controls add a second fleet management delivery model to NetApp console. There is also a conversational ChatOps interface in NetApp Console delivering autonomous storage operations across ONTAP storage systems. Several existing partnerships are being updated as well as fleet management facilities being introduced. We'll look at each of these in turn, starting with Novus. Novus Novus has disaggregated metadata and data servers, separating metadata from the data path so performance, capacity, and concurrency can scale independently under a single name space using industry-standard NFS. We noted that NetApp is acquiring parallel NFS software supplier Peak:AIO https://www.blocksandfiles.com/file/2026/09/25/netapp-buying-peakaio-to-give-ontap-parallel-nfs-injection/5299234 just days ago. The Novus file system is aimed at Neoclouds and GPU-as-a-Service providers building AI factories. This announcement sees NetApp saying it is fully able to compete with other high-performance AI factory storage suppliers such as DDN, Everpure, WEKA and VAST Data. Syam Nair, NetApp’s Chief Product Officer, 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. Leveraging the power of the NetApp Platform, Novus delivers 100 TB/sec of unlimited scale-out performance, leapfrogging the market to serve as the new high-performance, AI-scale storage architecture that unlocks the performance of millions of GPUs and delivers the return on investment needed to sustain the next wave of AI innovation. We’ve just delivered the fastest storage on the planet, that is purpose built for the AI Era.” NetApp says it supports zettabyte scale and will allow AI factories to keep millions of GPUs continuously fed with data; quite a claim - which is downrated to hundreds of thousands a paragraph or two below. This initial Novus release combines Novus Data Director, looking after metadata software, running on qualified Supermicro server infrastructure see below with ONTAP data services delivered through AFF A90 https://www.blocksandfiles.com/data-management/2024/05/14/netapp-refreshes-storage-hardware-software-for-ai-era/1602795? gl=1 etcszi ga MzE5OTg0NTIxLjE3NjI4MTAzNjQ. ga NSDTXHMMN0 czE3OTA2NzM2NTAkbzYzOCRnMSR0MTc5MDY3NTE5OSRqNjAkbDAkaDA. systems. NetApp says Novus is built to exceed 100 TB/sec bandwidth and support high utilization of hundreds of thousands of GPUs while preserving ONTAP enterprise data services. ONTAP on AFF systems A800, A90, and similar has supported GDS GPU Direct Storage via NFS over RDMA since ONTAP 9.12.1. Published results include ~171 GiB/s A800 and ~351 GiB/s A90 cluster so Novus will comfortably exceed that. NetApp AFX disaggregated ONTAP for AI is certified for Nvidia DGX SuperPOD and has been tested with Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage. NetApp published 457 GiB/s sustained across 8 AFX nodes. AFX docs list support for NFS over RDMA including GPU Direct, pNFS, and session trunking. We asked NetApp if Novus supports GPU Direct Storage via NFS over RDMA, pNFS and session trunking? Arindam Banerjee, Chief Platform and Technology Officer at NetApp, replied: "NetApp Novus is built on industry standard pNFS protocols so it is not limited to any particular GPU architecture.” Keystone Sovereign Keystone is NetApp’s storage subscription service. For many European customers, sovereignty requirements now extend beyond data residency to include operational access, telemetry, and data flow transparency. The new Keystone Sovereign product helps European customers use data sovereignty controls to support of compliance and data residency requirements. New capabilities include; - European-based data residency for relevant customer data, logs, backups, and telemetry where applicable - European-based support and escalation paths - European-controlled access/management processes - Clear documentation of telemetry, monitoring, and data flows - Contractual and legal structures that reinforce sovereignty expectations Ivan Iannaccone, VP and GM, Keystone at NetApp, 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.” Initial pilots for Keystone Sovereign will be available for Germany and France with additional countries planned to be added. It would be logical to assume there is a Keystone Sovereign roadmap with other support for other territories coming. Fleet management NetApp’s Console provides unified system administration functons through an AI-driven control plane to manage storage systems and data services, across on-premises and cloud environments. The company has added extra features to Console to make managing many, many NetApp systems as a single entity, a fleet, easier: - Console Fleet Management enables customers to manage their entire estate as a single entity delivering fleet management, observability, and AI through a second Console delivery model installed directly in the customer’s environment. NetApp Console now delivers one management function set with two delivery models to meet customers’ needs. - Console Autonomous Operations deliver AI-assisted autonomous operations with human oversight and provide a control plane for NetApp systems, helping admins predict issues, resolve incidents faster, and optimize capacity and costs through agentic AI-driven orchestration and API-accessed functions. - Console AI ChatOps Interface replaces manual workflows with a conversational interface, reducing the burden on enterprise admins who manage fragmented tools across massive hybrid fleets, without sacrificing governance or control. The ChatOps interface delivers autonomous storage operations, intent-based provisioning, and policy guardrails across ONTAP storage systems. It also provides AI-powered reporting, predictive analytics, and automated remediation. Customers can realize secure AI operations, operating through an open LLM gateway and using their own LLM. All actions remain within defined storage classes, policies, and governance boundaries. Sandeep Singh, NetApp SVP and GM, Platform, said: “Customers should not have to choose between the performance and control of on-premises infrastructure and the flexibility of cloud. With these new hybrid multi-cloud capabilities, NetApp is helping enterprises break down the borders between environments, operate with greater autonomy, and put efficiency, sovereignty, and control at the center of their data strategy.” AI Data Engine NetApp’s AI Data Engine <https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2026/07/17/netapp-buys-datapelago-to-become-full-stack-ai-data-infrastructure-provider/5274250 AIDE provides an AI data pipeline to have NetApp AFX-stored data made deliverable to and usable by AI Large language Models LLMs and agents. It is a built-in AI-focussed ETL Extract, Transform and Load pipeline that uses the AFX metadata engine. AIDE software can discover and characterize data spread across a customer’s NetApp data estate, both on-premises and in the three main public clouds. As fresh data comes in and/or old data is deleted the metadata is updated. AIDE has been updated to expand metadata discovery across the full enterprise data estate, including NetApp ONTAP, StorageGRID, and non-NetApp storage. This helps customers discover and understand data in place across NFS, SMB, and S3 repositories, enabling them to reduce security risk, optimize storage, accelerate data migrations, and identify AI-ready data. NetApp is previewing upcoming AIDE developments, including expanded AI-powered data understanding capabilities, deeper governance intelligence, open analytics integrations with analytics engines such as Starburst and Onehouse.AI, and new agentic services designed to help enterprises “securely turn data into actionable AI context at scale.” Partnerships NetApp made announcements about working with Commvault, Nutanix, Oracle, SAP, and Supermicro. The simple one first: by combining NetApp ONTAP with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, virtual machine and containerized workloads can benefit from ONTAP storage and its features. Oracle NetApp and Oracle announced a new, fully managed, OCI-native, storage service to bring ONTAP data management capabilities natively to OCI Oracle Cloud Infrastructure . This parallels existing fully-managed native ONTAP implementations for AWS, Azure and GCP. NetApp says this helps enterprises migrate, run, protect, and modernize databases, enterprise applications, virtualized environments, EDA/HPC, regulated applications, and AI data pipelines while preserving familiar storage operations. Customers can manage the OCI NetApp Storage Service through the OCI Console and SDKs, ONTAP APIs, and familiar operational workflows. Konstantinos kp Papamiltiadis, SVP of Partnerships at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said: “Enterprises shouldn't have to rebuild their data infrastructure to move to the cloud. OCI NetApp Storage Service gives customers a trusted, familiar path to OCI, so they can focus on what the data does, not how it's managed.” OCI NetApp Storage Service is planned for general availability within the next 12 months. NetApp announced an intention to expand its long-standing partnership with SAP, by exploring deeper cloud-native integration of NetApp capabilities into SAP Cloud Infrastructure, SAP’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform. NetApp already provides file and block storage services to SAP’s Cloud Infrastructure, with built-in data protection capabilities and data replication to support SAP’s global availability model. SAP and NetApp NetApp plan to explore joint go-to-market initiatives to help customers to migrate, modernize and operate SAP and non-SAP workloads on SAP Cloud Infrastructure with enterprise-grade performance, resilience, security and operational consistency. Looking ahead, NetApp and SAP also plan to evaluate NetApp Object storage StorageGRID in SAP Cloud Infrastructure, including a technical validation. Commvault Commvault and NetApp are partnering to protect and restore NetApp-stored data used for AI workloads. Commvault’s console is used to access real-time threat detection, scans that uncover evasive threats, cleanroom validation with advanced AI threat detection technology in an isolated environment, and advanced clean recovery. Autonomous ransomware protection signals on NetApp primary storage are connected to Commvault recovery workflows to enable joint customers “to recover in minutes rather than days or weeks without introducing reinfection.” Pranay Ahlawat, Chief Technology and AI Officer at Commvault, said: “By integrating NetApp’s ransomware detection and immutable data protection with Commvault’s clean recovery capabilities, we help customers accelerate response, restore trusted data with confidence, and reduce mean time to clean recover MTCR .” NetApp says these updates help customers move beyond copy-first AI architectures and toward a governed, protected, zero-copy operating model for enterprise data. It claims that, rather than treating AI readiness as a separate data-copy project or a closed, single-vendor stack, NetApp enables enterprises to activate existing data in place while preserving the access controls, data protection, and operational choice already in place. It talks about building toward richer AI-ready data capabilities, including semantic search, knowledge graphs, decision context, and agentic activation. Supermicro A strategic collaboration with AI-optimized compute and rack-scale server vendor Supermicro will deliver jointly validated AI infrastructure systems spanning large-scale AI factories, enterprise deployments, neoclouds, and sovereign AI initiatives. The partnership brings together Supermicro’s rack-scale compute, networking, power, and liquid-cooling expertise with the NetApp’s unified data management, cyber resilience, hybrid-cloud features, and disaggregated scale. Customers can scale compute and data independently as workload needs change, The joint systems are expected to deliver the governance, cyber resilience, and compliance that enterprises, governments, neoclouds, and GPU-as-a-service providers require. Alvaro Celis, NetApp SVP, Chief Commercial, Partner and Ecosystem Officer, said: “By combining Supermicro’s AI leadership and ability to scale with the NetApp Platform, we can give customers—from commercial, enterprise to internet-with the most demanding requirements—secure, reliable AI solutions they can deploy quickly to accelerate innovation and build market leadership.” NetApp and Supermicro will deliver Novus Data Director software running on qualified Supermicro servers with NetApp AFF A90 systems as the high-performance ONTAP data layer. This initial implementation is the first step in a broader collaboration to co-engineer integrated infrastructure solutions for enterprise AI, neocloud, sovereign AI, and large-scale AI factory environments. NetApp and Supermicro are also collaborating to support enterprises building a private AI platform with NetApp AIPod with Supermicro, a NetApp-validated converged infrastructure architecture built to the Nvidia Enterprise Reference Architecture design. This validated and complete system will give enterprise customers proven guidance for AI training, inference, and agentic workloads from dozens to hundreds of GPUs. It will be delivered by NetApp’s channel partners. Comment There's lots of incremental product and managed service goodness in these Insight announcements, many with an AI flavor. A big event is Novus, and NetApp specifically mentions an initial release, meaning more is coming. We look at all this and surmise that ambitious NetApp isn't going to concede anything to fast-moving, heavily AI-focussed competitors like DDN, Everpure, WEKA and VAST Data looking to invade its customer base and markets. It's going full tilt for the AI factory market, as well as retrofitting AI and fleet management facilities to its existing products, and expanding its cloud reach to OCI with SAP infrastructure Cloud coming along too. Tuck-in acquisitions like Data Pelago and Peak:AIO show that its management is set on filling in technology gaps and enabling its vast installed base to adopt AI functionality without having to leave the familiar ONTAP environment. AI ONTAP - it has a ring to it, don't you think?