NetApp data platform: The unified, enterprise-grade foundation for intelligent data infrastructure

For decades, enterprises thought of storage as a box in the data center; a place to keep data safe and available. But the world has changed. Today, data is no longer passive. It fuels real-time decisions, trains AI models, detects threats, and drives outcomes across hybrid and multicloud environments. The scale, complexity, and velocity of data have exploded, and a static infrastructure can’t keep up.

The NetApp^® data platform is the unified, enterprise-grade foundation for intelligent data infrastructure—built to modernize, secure, transform, and innovate with confidence. From day 1, it has been one platform for file, block, object, and semantic data, running consistently across on-premises, private clouds, NetApp Keystone^® STaaS, and all major hyperscalers. At its core, it’s a unified control plane and high-performance data plane, both powered by three decades of innovation in NetApp ONTAP^® and enhanced by a purpose-built AI Data Engine to deliver automation, observability, protection, and governance at every layer. Unlike bolt-ons or stitched-together stacks, the data platform was designed disaggregated and intelligent, so that storage, services, and control scale independently without lock-in. And because it integrates natively with the tools that enterprises already use, from AI/ML frameworks and MLOps pipelines to data engineering and analytics platforms, the NetApp data platform means that data is always ready.

Why does this foundation matter? Because the pressures are real, and they’re growing:

• Data explosion. Over 80% of enterprise data is unstructured, and it’s expanding exponentially through sensors, apps, and AI pipelines. The challenge isn’t just storage – it’s unifying, indexing, and governing that sprawl into AI-ready datasets.
• Power and cooling limits. Data centers are hitting physical ceilings. Efficiency gains now come from denser storage, data reduction, and smart tiering that reduce footprint and energy demand.
• Regulatory pressure. Compliance can’t be an afterthought. Policy-as-code, lineage tracking, and audit-ready controls are becoming table stakes.
• AI project failures. Gartner predicts that 60% of AI projects will be abandoned in 2026. The culprit? Data that isn’t AI-ready. Rich metadata, lineage, feature pipelines, and performance SLAs are what move AI from experiment to outcome.
• Cloud sprawl and cost creep. Flexibility without control leads to runaway complexity. Hybrid mobility and FinOps discipline keep workloads in the right place at the right cost.
• Rising cyber risk. Threats are relentless. Only default-on resilience – immutable snapshots, continuous detection, rapid recovery, and Zero Trust guardrails – can keep pace.

Bottom line. AI-ready, protected data with built-in guardrails is the difference between stalled initiatives and sustainable outcomes.

The NetApp data platform removes friction between data and outcomes, giving enterprises a trusted way to activate data securely, intelligently, and at scale so that infrastructure accelerates innovation instead of holding it back. Unlike fragmented stacks or rigid monoliths, it is natively disaggregated – separating storage, services, and control so that each can scale independently. That means more flexibility, more efficiency, and no trade-offs as demands evolve.

What makes the NetApp data platform different is not only what it supports but how it was designed. The platform is:

• Unified by design. One consistent platform for file, block, object, and semantic data, spanning on premises and cloud without fragmentation
• Enterprise grade. Resilience, performance, and security proven in the world’s most demanding environments
• Intelligent everywhere. Automation, observability, and optimization embedded at every layer so that data works harder, smarter, and safer
• Autonomous control plane. AI-driven intelligence that manages, protects, and optimizes data across the entire estate, evolving toward self-healing and closed-loop operations
• Native on all major clouds. the only enterprise storage platform that’s deeply integrated with Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud at the operating system level
• Ecosystem –ready. Open, extensible, and integrated with enterprise applications, AI frameworks, and DevOps/MLOps tooling, avoiding lock-in

The impact shows up in the outcomes that the NetApp data platform enables:

• AI innovation. Accelerates the full AI lifecycle with zero-copy pipelines, semantic enrichment, and distributed processing, integrated with the NVIDIA, AWS, Azure, and Google AI ecosystems.
• Data infrastructure modernization. Replaces years of fragmented, piecemeal decisions with a composable foundation that scales compute and storage independently, embeds policy-driven automation, and means seamless mobility with solutions like NetApp Shift and AFX.
• Cyber resilience. Delivers real-time ransomware detection, immutable protection, and Zero Trust recovery, so resilience is built in, not bolted on.
• Cloud transformation. Delivers consistent operations, unified governance, and portability across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and sovereign providers without compromise.

The vision extends even further. The platform is evolving into a metadata-driven fabric that transforms raw, unstructured data into AI-ready knowledge assets. That vision includes:

• Moving beyond the extract, transform, load (ETL) process with semantic services, knowledge graphs, and industry-specific data models that eliminate manual preparation and accelerate time –to insight.
• Powering real-time, event-driven pipelines that connect data directly to workloads, so that AI can operate on the freshest information.
• Supporting distributed and near-data processing so that AI can run wherever data resides, overcoming the challenges of data gravity.
• Extending open standards such as Iceberg and Parquet for long-term portability and to protect customer choice.

This vision is the shift from managing storage to activating intelligence, a future where infrastructure does more than hold data. It transforms data into insight, makes it searchable, and turns it into an active enabler of outcomes.

The NetApp data platform redefines what a modern enterprise foundation should be: unified, enterprise grade, intelligent, cloud connected, and ecosystem ready. It’s how the intelligent data infrastructure comes to life, enabling organizations to modernize, secure, transform, and innovate with confidence. This is the power behind every outcome.

NetApp has been at the forefront of data innovation for decades, helping enterprises navigate seismic shifts in technology, from virtualization to the cloud. At NetApp INSIGHT^® 2025, we announced more than 25 product and solution updates that push the boundaries of what’s possible with an intelligent data infrastructure. Explore them all.