Exabyte-scale AFX systems with disaggregated storage and NVIDIA’s integrated AI Data Engine deliver AI-driven insights
NetApp, the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, unveiled visionary new products, strengthening its enterprise data platform for AI innovation. As the era of AI moves from early pilots to mission-critical applications, AI-ready data on a modern enterprise data infrastructure delivers the results needed for AI-driven businesses.
The new NetApp AFX decouples performance from capacity with a disaggregated version of NetApp ONTAP, running on the new NetApp AFX 1K storage system. The NetApp AI Data Engine is a unified and secure extension of ONTAP, integrated with NVIDIA’s reference-model AI data platform , that helps organizations simplify and secure the entire AI data pipeline all managed from a single, unified control plane. Together, these solutions unify high-performance storage and intelligent data services into a single, secure, and scalable offering that accelerates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and enterprise AI inferencing across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Customers will be able to access these products through direct purchase or through a NetApp Keystone STaaS subscription. With NetApp AFX and the NetApp AI Data Engine, the NetApp data platform ensures all relevant data is immediately AI-ready.
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“With the new NetApp AFX systems, customers now have a proven and reliable solution for on-premises enterprise storage built on a comprehensive data platform that can rapidly drive AI innovation,” said Syam Nair, chief product officer at NetApp. “The NetApp AI Data Engine allows customers to seamlessly connect their databases across hybrid and multi-cloud environments to build a unified database. This allows organizations to dramatically accelerate their AI data pipelines by consolidating multiple data preparation and management steps into the integrated NetApp AI Data Engine, built with NVIDIA accelerated computing technologies and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including semantic search, data vectorization, and data guardrails. The combination of NetApp AFX and the AI Data Engine gives organizations the resiliency and performance NetApp ONTAP has been known for for decades, now in a disaggregated storage architecture, still built on the world’s most secure storage.”
To accelerate modern AI workloads, NetApp has introduced new features, including:
- NetApp AFX : NetApp AFX is an enterprise-grade, all-flash disaggregated storage system designed for the most demanding AI workloads. The cutting-edge data foundation for AI factories, NetApp AFX is certified storage for the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD supercomputer and powered by NetApp ONTAP, the industry’s best-in-class storage operating system used by tens of thousands of companies across various industries to manage exabytes of data. AFX delivers the same robust data management capabilities and built-in cyber resilience that NetApp is known for, along with secure multi-tenancy and seamless integration between on-premises and cloud environments. AFX is designed for linear performance scaling up to 128 nodes, with multi-terabyte per second bandwidth, exabyte-scale capacity, and independent scaling of performance and capacity. Optional DX50 Data Compute Nodes enable the creation of a global metadata engine, providing a real-time catalog of enterprise data, while leveraging NVIDIA’s accelerated computing.
- 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 delivery to GenAI applications, AIDE provides a global, up-to-date view of a customer’s entire NetApp data set for rapid search and curation, while seamlessly connecting their data to any model or tool on-premises and in the public cloud. It automates change detection and data synchronization, eliminating redundant copies and ensuring data is always up-to-date. Built-in safeguards accompany data throughout its AI lifecycle, ensuring its security and privacy. AIDE leverages the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference model which includes NVIDIA accelerated computing and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including NVIDIA NIM microservices for vectorization and search, while integrating advanced compression, rapid semantic discovery, and secure, policy-driven workflows. By bringing AI closer to the data in an integrated system, AIDE delivers the efficiency, data transparency, and governance needed to empower enterprises to adopt AI with confidence. NetApp AIDE will run natively within the AFX cluster, on top of DX50 data compute nodes. Expanded ecosystem support is planned, including the integration of NVIDIA RTX PRO servers with RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs . NetApp AIDE accelerates customers’ AI transformation with simplicity, security, and efficiency.
- Object API for seamless access to Azure Data & AI services : Customers can now access their Azure NetApp Files data via an object REST API, available in public preview. With this new capability, customers no longer need to move or copy file data to a separate object store to use it with Azure services. Instead, NFS and SMB databases can be connected directly to Microsoft Fabric, Azure OpenAI, Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse, Azure AI Search, Azure Machine Learning, and more. Customers can analyze data, train AI models, enable intelligent search, and build modern applications on their ANF datasets, all while benefiting from the consistent reliability of Azure NetApp Files for Enterprise.
- Optimized unified international namespace in Microsoft Azure: Enterprises can now seamlessly unify their international data estate, whether hosted in the cloud or on-premises, in Microsoft Azure with the new FlexCache capabilities in Azure NetApp Files. This same functionality can also extend their on-premises workloads, such as electronic design automation. This makes data stored in other ONTAP-based storage systems in customer data centers or across multiple clouds instantly visible and editable in an ANF environment, but with granular data transfer only on demand. This enables seamless access to hybrid databases in a customer’s cloud in Microsoft Azure. Additionally, enterprises can effortlessly migrate data and snapshots between environments using SnapMirror, supporting hybrid use cases such as continuous backup, automated disaster recovery, and workload balancing across environments.
“Enterprises are looking for a reliable, high-performance database to convert massive volumes of information into real insights that fuel their AI journey,” said Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI products at NVIDIA. “The NetApp Data Platform has transformed into an AI-native storage platform by integrating NVIDIA accelerated computing technologies and software, including cutting-edge AI models. With this new platform, enterprises can index and search vast amounts of unstructured data across their organizations to drive innovation and deliver real-world business impact.”
“The new solutions NetApp is offering today demonstrate the rapid realization of an ambitious vision for data management for AI,” said Michael Leone, practice director and principal analyst at Omdia. “The way NetApp solutions bring intelligence to enterprise data reveals a deep understanding of the real-world challenges customers face and how to address them. Adding performance-agnostic scalability and capacity management to ONTAP’s robust data management capabilities, which have long defined NetApp’s reputation, will enable organizations to confidently invest in AI projects that quickly deliver value to their business.”
Source: Businesswire
