Accelerating AI and cloud transformation

Since 2013, NetApp has been at the forefront of cloud-based storage solutions. By collaborating with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft, we continuously push the boundaries of performance, cost efficiency, and cyber resilience—all while simplifying data management and enabling seamless data mobility.

Today, we’re proud to announce several advancements that deepen our collaboration with major cloud vendors, helping you speed your cloud transformation with AI and address critical business challenges.

AI innovation thrives in the public cloud. With NetApp^® ONTAP^® software, the only unified data operating system that spans on-premises environments and the three largest public clouds, NetApp empowers you to apply any AI model to your data without requiring data movement.

Microsoft Azure AI and data services Integration

Customers often have large volumes of enterprise data stored on premises and in the cloud, but they struggle to make it discoverable and searchable across Azure services without complex data movement. Moving data can be complex, risky, and expensive.

With the integration of NetApp ONTAP, Microsoft Azure AI, and Microsoft data services—including Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Databricks, and Microsoft Fabric—alongside ISV ecosystem partners, customers can now seamlessly work with any data stored on ONTAP, whether on premises or in the cloud. This includes Azure NetApp Files, which can be accessed through cloud-native REST APIs.

This capability enables customers to run AI and analytics workloads directly on NetApp resident data, whether on premises or in the cloud, without needing to move or duplicate data.

Integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes now strengthens its integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, enabling direct use of data as a native source for building custom agents—without custom code or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. By incorporating context-specific data from reputable sources like NetApp Volumes, AI responses are more accurate, reliable, and grounded, facilitating informed decision-making and reducing operational risks.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes now offers unified storage. In addition to NFS and SMB NAS protocols, the Flex service level now also supports the SAN protocol through iSCSI. You can use both file and block storage with enterprise-grade ONTAP capabilities.

Key workloads unlocked by unified storage include:

• Self-managed databases. Examples include Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.
• VMware migrations. Seamlessly migrate on-premises vSphere VMFS datastores to Google Cloud VMware Engine.
• Enterprise SAN workloads. Support IOPS-intensive, latency-sensitive applications such as Epic.
• Kubernetes applications. Manage persistent data across many small volumes.

NetApp FlexCache^® technology is now available across Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. FlexCache caches actively read data rather than entire files or volumes, enabling elastic scaling and compute on demand while maintaining fast, secure access to enterprise data.

• Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. With the addition of FlexCache to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, you can seamlessly extend and accelerate on-premises workloads into Google Cloud. By providing a high-performance cache from ONTAP systems to a high-performance cache in Google Cloud, NetApp Volumes supports true hybrid operations—empowering businesses to leverage the agility of the cloud without sacrificing access to local datasets or requiring rearchitecting of their environments.
• Azure NetApp Files. Cache volumes simplify file distribution, reduce WAN latency, and lower WAN/ExpressRoute bandwidth costs. They enable distributed product development across multiple sites, as well as on-premises access to cloud datasets, providing a writable, persistent cache of a volume in an Azure region that’s consistent, coherent, and current.

The NetApp SnapMirror^® replication feature of ONTAP now supports all three cloud storage services (Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes), enabling strong data mobility and disaster recovery.

• Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. You now have robust, bidirectional data mobility between Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and on-premises environments or NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Google Cloud. You can effortlessly migrate data back and forth using SnapMirror, enabling hybrid use cases such as continuous backup, automated disaster recovery, and workload balancing across environments.
• Azure NetApp Files. Using SnapMirror replication, you can efficiently and cost-effectively migrate data to Azure NetApp Files from on-premises environments, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, or FSx for ONTAP. The SnapMirror based migration assistant employs block-level replication, enabling high-speed data transfer from a source volume to a destination volume. This approach minimizes cutover/downtime windows during migration and is now configurable through the Azure portal.

The year 2025 brought many innovations and industry-leading enhancements to the Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP service. Three notable advancements include improved security with NetApp Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) with AI, optimized storage utilization by decreasing SSD storage capacity, and integration with Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS). Extending or lifting and shifting Linux and Windows workloads into the hybrid cloud and AWS Cloud has never been easier.

Amazon EVS is the fastest path for migrating and operating VMware workloads on AWS and allows you to experience the scale, resilience, and performance of AWS while keeping your familiar VMware Cloud Foundation software and skills. No replatforming or refactoring is required. Combining Amazon EVS with FSx for ONTAP mitigates several challenges of running VMware workloads in the cloud, while helping you lower TCO by allowing storage and compute to scale independently. In addition, combining these solutions and services addresses demands for backing up, protecting, and recovering VMware instances and data with features such as NetApp Snapshot^™ technology.

The connection between FSx for ONTAP and Amazon EVS now supports a range of new capabilities, including NFS 4.1, cross-region replication, multi-AZ file system configurations, NVMe datastore support, and block guest-attached storage. Additionally, further support includes the NetApp Workload Factory Migration Advisor for Amazon EVS and NetApp Backup and Recovery integration. These features deliver increased resilience, expanded protocol support, improved block storage utilization, and enhanced migration planning.

Cloud migrations are a common challenge that many of our customers face. Commercially licensed migration products can be cost-prohibitive, while open-source data movers often lack support and enterprise-grade features. To provide a seamless migration experience to the cloud, we are excited to announce the preview of NetApp Data Migrator (NDM).

NDM enables customers to migrate unstructured file data shared via NFS and SMB protocols from non-NetApp on-premises storage systems and cloud storage services to Azure NetApp Files and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. Support for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and Cloud Volumes ONTAP will be available soon.

With NDM, customers can discover, assess, and transfer both data and metadata using baseline and incremental data transfer jobs. Users can seamlessly cut over to the destination, verify the integrity of migrated data with Chain-of-Custody (CoC) reporting (which provides audit support), and easily identify and troubleshoot any issues with clear, actionable error logs. Additionally, customers can monitor the progress of all migration activities through automatically updated dashboards.

NetApp Data Migrator complements SnapMirror-based migration functionality available for our cloud storage services by enabling users to migrate from non-NetApp sources. Best of all, NDM is available at no additional cost and is fully supported by NetApp.

Click here to register your interest in using NDM for your cloud migration project.

Coming soon in private preview, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP will integrate with Microsoft Azure VMware Solution, enabling seamless migration of block-based VMware workloads to Azure.

Other updates include support for Google Cloud next-generation instances, which boost I/O throughput, enabling faster performance for demanding workloads and speeding up business outcomes

On Azure, VNet encryption of data in transit at the infrastructure layer reduces unplanned failover times, enhances security, and improves application resilience for both encrypted and unencrypted VNets.

The AI-powered VS code extension for Azure NetApp Files, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP generates code instantly without the need for documentation, APIs, or samples—bringing intelligent, developer-first storage management directly into Visual Studio Code. This extension transforms how developers and IT teams manage and interact with storage, making it as simple as typing a chat message.

By combining AI-driven recommendations for provisioning, performance optimization, and cost efficiency, this innovation eliminates up to 90% of workflow interruptions and saves over 2 hours per developer per day, allowing teams to focus on what matters most: building great software.

To explore these updates and other innovations across the NetApp portfolio, visit NetApp Product Updates.