Ignore AI hype: Meet raw power and flexibility for enterprise AI

The march toward AI excellence continues, but who is really winning? Who is putting theory into practice? While the journey toward AI maturity has become a critical focus for CIOs and CTOs, the race is far from over. According to the latest findings from our AI maturity model survey with IDC, a significant number of enterprises are still in the early stages of their AI adoption journey and less than half of AI pilots actually make it into production. This means there is still a pressing need for robust, scalable, and efficient AI solutions that can drive business transformation.

At NetApp INSIGHT 2025, we unveiled groundbreaking innovations designed to build AI-ready data infrastructure that gets your AI pilots into production more efficiently, ultimately leading to faster ROI. Our collaboration with industry leaders like NVIDIA can help businesses manage and leverage their data for AI – today. Here’s a closer look at the key announcements and what they mean for your business.

• Unified data platform: NetApp’s new unified data platform integrates data storage, processing, and transformation, supporting various data types (file, block, object). This platform simplifies the journey from raw data to AI-ready data, ensuring seamless data operations across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Intelligent data infrastructure: This approach includes advanced metadata engines and federated controls. It’s designed to make data management more efficient, secure, and scalable, addressing the complex needs of modern enterprises.

What this means for CIOs and CTOs: By adopting a unified data platform, CIOs and CTOs can streamline data management across environments, reduce complexity, and enhance data readiness for AI applications – ultimately aligning AI strategy with business goals. Built-in security helps accelerate business value.

• NetApp AFX: This disaggregated storage platform is built for the AI era, offering exabyte-scale capabilities with independent scaling of performance and capacity. It’s designed to efficiently handle the massive data demands of AI applications.
• AI Data Engine (AIDE): Integrated with the AFX platform, AIDE transforms raw data into AI-ready data in place, eliminating the need for complex ETL (extract, transform, load) processes. It supports fast search, curation, and connection to any AI model or tool across on-premises and cloud environments.

“NetApp AI Data Engine will give our customers a single, current view of all data across their entire NetApp data estate—so their teams can find, secure, and leverage the right datasets fast.” – Derek Elbert, High Performance Architecture Practice Lead, World Wide Technology

What this means for CIOs and CTOs: Disaggregated architecture enables flexible scaling, ensuring that businesses can efficiently manage large-scale data demands without over-provisioning resources. AIDE automates data transformation, significantly reducing the time and complexity involved in preparing data for AI. Paired together, you can accelerate AI deployments and transform your AI strategy from a series of stalled pilots into a reliable engine for growth.

• Validation matters: NetApp AFX has been tested and validated by NVIDIA for the most demanding enterprise AI, deep learning, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads as part of the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. The joint validation provides a fully integrated, turnkey architecture that simplifies deployment and reduces risk.
• Enhanced AI capabilities: Combining NetApp’s storage solutions with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capabilities ensures high performance and precision for data scientists. Zero-copy data processing allows data to be processed directly within the storage system, eliminating the need for multiple data copies and enhancing efficiency.
• Semantic storage and AI: Semantic storage represents a significant leap forward in data management, particularly for AI applications. By embedding meaning and context into data, it enables more efficient data discovery, improved data quality, and the development of advanced AI models. As the collaboration between NetApp and NVIDIA continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and data management, semantic storage will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of intelligent data solutions.

"Enterprises are looking for a trusted, high-performance data foundation to turn massive volumes of information into real intelligence that powers their AI journey. NetApp's data platform has transformed into an AI-native storage platform by integrating NVIDIA accelerated computing and software, including leading AI models. With this new platform, organizations can index and search vast amounts of unstructured data across their enterprise to drive innovation and deliver real business impact." – Justin Boitano, VP, Enterprise AI Products, NIVIDIA

What this means for CIOs and CTOs: The integration of NetApp’s and NVIDIA’s technologies provides a seamless way for managing diverse data types across various environments, simplifying data management and enhancing AI capabilities. Businesses can extract meaningful insights from unstructured and multimodal data, driving measurable AI results, growth, efficiency, and the competitive advantage your organization needs to lead.

• AWS collaboration: Our collaboration with AWS has resulted in solutions like Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, enabling seamless migration of VMware workloads to AWS and integration with AWS AI services.
• Google Cloud integration: Google Cloud NetApp Volumes now supports block storage, enhancing flexibility and scalability for AI and other critical workloads. Integration with Google’s Gemini Enterprise reduces AI deployment time significantly.
• Microsoft partnership: Azure NetApp Files now offers enhanced performance and integration with Azure Discovery for AI applications, enabling faster and more secure data management.

What this means for CIOs and CTOs: Training happens where the compute is cheapest; inference runs where users are, and data stays where regulations require – all of which means AI is inherently a hybrid multicloud workload. Yet most storage vendors only work in one cloud. These partnerships and native cloud integrations ensure that your business can bring AI to your data, wherever it is, solving complex data mobility challenges. Scale resources based on demand and manage everything from one unified storage operating system, using cloud technologies on your own terms (without vendor lock in).

• Ransomware resilience: New services include data breach discovery and isolated recovery environments, ensuring robust protection against cyber threats. These features detect anomalies and prevent data exfiltration at the storage layer, providing secure and rapid recovery options. 

What this means for CIOs and CTOs: Integrated security features protect against ransomware and other cyber threats, ensuring data integrity and availability. This is crucial for maintaining business continuity and protecting sensitive information. 

Whether it’s seamless integration to hybrid multiclouds or NVIDIA SuperPods, NetApp knows how to help you get the most from AI. We can provide you with the solutions you need to tackle your most complex AI initiatives. The future of AI is more than models and chatbots. It’s about who can best use the intelligent, semantic data infrastructure that powers them. 

 
Watch our on-demand webinar to explore the unified AI data platform we launched at INSIGHT 2025.
 

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