NetApp AI Data Engine is launching. And that’s just the beginning.

When we introduced NetApp^® AI Data Engine (AIDE) last October, we described a bold vision: a single, end-to-end AI data platform —co-engineered with NVIDIA — that would make enterprise AI simple, affordable, secure, and production-ready. No sprawling toolchains, no disconnected point tools, no compliance guesswork. The response from customers and partners was immediate and electric. Today, we're turning that vision into reality.

We are thrilled to announce that NetApp AI Data Engine will launch this month for an initial wave of lighthouse customers and partners, with broad availability coming in early summer.

This is more than a product milestone. It's a signal to the enterprise AI market that the data infrastructure layer, long the hidden bottleneck blocking AI from reaching production, now has a powerful solution.

When we first unveiled AIDE, we laid out the fundamental challenge holding enterprise AI back: organizations aren't struggling with models or compute; they're struggling with data. Unstructured, ungoverned, and hard-to-find data scattered across global data estates, impossible to access quickly and safely enough to fuel critical production GenAI workloads like RAG and agentic AI.

Think of it this way: if data is AI's fuel, then finding and using the best data is what separates transformative AI from the noise. Yet most enterprises today have no reliable way to know what data they actually have, where it lives, or whether it's ready for AI consumption. That's the problem AIDE was built to solve, and with the launch this month, it's a problem enterprises can finally tackle.

At the heart of AIDE is a capability unlike anything else in the market: an automatically created and continuously updated global metadata catalog with powerful semantic search across your data estate.

What truly differentiates this is what AIDE does beyond standard file system metadata. AIDE actively analyzes file content to semantically enrich metadata, understanding what data actually means, not just where it sits. The result is a living, intelligent catalog that empowers enterprises to find, curate, use, and govern the right data at every stage of the AI data pipeline: from selection and transformation, through retrieval and serving, to AI applications and agents.

Your data stays where it lives. AIDE continuously, automatically, and at scale brings intelligence to it.

NetApp has always been a strong champion of open technology ecosystems, and AIDE reflects that commitment deeply. We are continuing to expand integrations with a growing roster of ISV partners, both on-premises and in the cloud, providing the seamless, enterprise-grade connectivity that production AI workloads demand.

Coming very soon, AIDE will first deliver integrations with leading AI application development platforms, including Microsoft M365 Copilot, Google Vertex, and LangChain. These integrations enable developers to rapidly build AI applications that securely leverage unstructured enterprise data continuously, made AI-ready in place, with continual data classification, governance, and access-control built-in.

These aren't superficial connectors. They are the kind of deep, trusted integrations that transform experimental AI pilots into mission-critical production workloads, wherever your data and workloads live.

We know enterprises don't have uniform infrastructure, and AIDE shouldn't require them to change it. Over the next few months, AIDE will expand to support an increasing number of deployment options, giving customers the infrastructure flexibility they need.

NetApp will offer AIDE as a software-only deployment that customers can run on a variety of server options, tailored to their individual use cases. For example, customers will be able to use NetApp AIDE across their data estate with the new NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 GPUs - announced today at NVIDIA GTC - and NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 GPUs. And AIDE will quickly extend support to a wide range of new and existing NetApp storage environments - including AFF A-Series, AFF C-Series, and FAS - enabling enterprises to activate AI-ready data in place across their existing infrastructure, eliminating data migration and dramatically accelerating time to value.

This launch and the near-term roadmap are just the opening act. This summer, AIDE will add several powerful new capabilities that extend its reach and capabilities even further.

Expansive hybrid cloud support will bring AIDE capabilities to your data, no matter where it lives - seamlessly spanning on-premises and cloud storage across your entire global data estate.

Multimodal data capabilities will extend AIDE's intelligence to images and visually rich documents (VRDs), unlocking entirely new use cases in industries where critical enterprise knowledge is locked in formats many AI pipelines can't easily understand and utilize, from healthcare imaging to manufacturing documentation to media-rich financial reports.

And robust agentic AI support will enable seamless, secure, governed agentic workflows across your global NetApp data estate, built on popular industry-standard protocols, meeting the moment as autonomous AI agents become a defining frontier of enterprise productivity.

Everything in AIDE at launch and across the roadmap reflects a core conviction we've held from day one: the enterprises that win in the AI era will be those that can access the right data, in the right form, with the right governance, faster than the competition.

NetApp is uniquely positioned to deliver that. AIDE seamlessly extends ONTAP^®, the same trusted storage OS managing over 100 exabytes of enterprise data worldwide. There's no rip-and-replace, no new data silos, and no compromise between enterprise-grade reliability and AI-scale performance.

The lighthouse customers preparing to deploy AIDE this month are about to discover what we've always believed: when data infrastructure becomes truly intelligent, AI teams move fast. Models reach production. Business outcomes follow.

AIDE launches this month, with broad availability coming this summer. If you're ready to accelerate your enterprise AI journey - or if your AI projects are stalled waiting on enterprise-grade, AI-ready data infrastructure - let NetApp help you turn the promise of AI into a transformative reality.

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