NetApp AI Data Engine
Your data, agent ready. No copies. No rebuilding.
NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE) makes your distributed enterprise data agent-ready without moving it, copying it, or rebuilding your storage architecture. Know it. Trust it. Activate it in place.
Three moves. One solution.
Know your data
Finally see what you have and where it lives across your entire data estate. Map, catalog, and classify dark, unstructured data across NetApp and third-party storage, in place, without copying or moving a single file.
Trust your data
Your data stays under your control, even as agent access expands. Sensitive and over-shared data is surfaced before AI reaches it, and because nothing is copied, existing permissions stay intact.
Activate data in place
Put your data to work without copies or rebuilding. Governed data is served to your AI applications, analytics tools, and agents right where it already lives, always reflecting the source rather than a stale copy.
Start with discovery
Storage teams stop hunting for data and start answering in minutes: What do we have, where does it live, and what can go? The same catalog becomes the foundation data and AI teams need for data understanding, governance, transformation, and semantic search.
The foundation AI teams build on
The catalog you build today is what data engineers and AI teams work from next: data understanding, governance at the data layer, transformation and vectorization, and semantic search. All on your data, in place, with nothing re-platformed.
Nothing to move, Nothing to disrupt
Start with discovery. A read-only metadata catalog gives you visibility without changing a thing, so you can put agents to work across your heterogeneous estate today and expand into broader AI use cases on your terms.
One billion files a day. Scanned in place.
AIDE scans directly in your environment and agentless across third-party storage. No collectors to babysit. No copies to manage. Just fast, in-place understanding of unstructured data at a scale that keeps pace with how fast enterprise data actually grows.
"Making distributed enterprise data usable for AI without moving or copying it addresses one of the hardest problems standing between organizations and real AI value."
Simon Robinson, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
FAQs
What is NetApp AIDE?
The AIDE, part of the NetApp Platform, makes your data agent ready. It discovers and classifies data across NetApp and third-party storage, preserves permissions and governance, and activates current, trusted data in place for AI applications, analytics, and agents, with no copies to manage and no pipelines to rebuild.
Does AIDE work with third-party storage?
Yes. AIDE discovers and classifies data across NetApp ONTAP, NetApp StorageGRID®, and third-party NAS and object storage. It reads your data in place using standard NFS, SMB, and S3 protocols, so a mixed estate becomes one catalog instead of a dozen blind spots.
Does AIDE help with governance?
Yes. It helps identify sensitive and over-shared data, preserve your source permissions, and control what AI applications and agents are allowed to access. Because nothing is copied, the permissions you already set stay intact, with no second location to re-secure. It includes governance at the data layer, with classification, masking, redaction, and policy guardrails.
What’s on the roadmap?
Data discovery and metadata services are available today, covering estate-wide mapping, ROT cleanup, and access hygiene. Data understanding, including entity extraction and semantic search, and governed data services, including permission-aware retrieval and open analytics, are in preview. Context and coherence, the knowledge graph and Decision Fabric, are on the roadmap. The services deploy on premises today and reach data across the hybrid cloud; fully disconnected sovereign and air-gapped operation is on the roadmap.
Does AIDE require me to move or copy my data?
No. It reads your data in place, right where it already lives, across NetApp and third-party storage. Your content and its metadata stay in your environment, with nothing copied out to a NetApp service. Management runs through the NetApp Console.
Ready to get started?
Get your data flowing from edge to core to cloud.
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