Menu

Multitenancy and resource management: Shared enterprise AI excellence

coworkers meeting at a table
Table Of Contents

Share this page

Mackinnon Giddings
Mackinnon Giddings
77 views

AI factories are becoming enterprise AI hubs, serving multiple teams and workloads simultaneously. As AI initiatives scale beyond pilots, resource contention and performance inconsistency threaten success, making shared-resource optimization essential. Traditional approaches create silos that limit collaboration and waste resources. Modern AI factories need multitenant intelligence to transform isolated systems into unified enterprise services. NetApp and NVIDIA provide the foundation for consistent performance across stakeholders and workloads, maximizing AI investments while reducing operational complexity. This transformation relies on three pillars: intelligent resource management, performance isolation, and unified operations.

Enterprise AI resource management: Solving multiworkload performance challenges

Enterprise AI infrastructure faces unique challenges as diverse teams compete for limited resources. AI factories must accommodate data scientists, ML engineers, and analysts with vastly different computing needs and workflows. Workloads range from GPU-intensive training to low-latency inference, creating unpredictable resource demands that complicate capacity planning.

Traditional approaches fall short. Resource contention leads to performance degradation and inconsistent project timelines. Siloed systems waste resources through underutilization while increasing management complexity. Without proper workload isolation, "noisy neighbor" problems arise where one team's activities degrade another's performance. Managing these isolated systems diverts IT from strategic initiatives.

Business consequences are significant. Resource conflicts delay AI projects, missing critical deadlines and undermining confidence. Poor resource sharing leads to underutilized GPUs and storage, making it difficult to justify investments. Access limitations create innovation bottlenecks. Ultimately, enterprise AI initiatives struggle to scale beyond pilots when infrastructure cannot support the diverse, concurrent workloads needed for organization-wide deployment.

NetApp ONTAP multitenancy: Enterprise storage for shared AI infrastructure

Enterprise-grade resource management transforms AI infrastructure operations. Intelligent workload orchestration balances resources across infrastructure, optimizing concurrent AI workloads without manual intervention. Storage efficiency features (deduplication, compression, thin provisioning) maximize capacity utilization while reducing ownership costs. Dynamic resource allocation ensures optimal use of expensive AI computing resources by scaling storage performance to match compute demands. Unified data access through global namespaces provides a seamless data experience while eliminating cross-system management complexity.

NetApp® ONTAP® delivers multitenancy capabilities for enterprise AI workloads, enabling secure infrastructure sharing across diverse workloads without compromising isolation or compliance. Storage clusters can be subdivided into secure partitions with comprehensive permissions, preventing workload interference while maintaining efficiency. Adaptive quality of service automatically adjusts storage resources to meet changing demands, so that critical AI workloads receive necessary resources when needed.

The scalable multitenant architecture addresses both current and future enterprise AI requirements. Seamless scaling allows organizations to add compute and storage resources without disrupting existing workloads or requiring complex reconfigurations that can take systems offline for extended periods. Performance consistency through unified fabric architecture means that all workloads maintain high performance and low latency as the infrastructure grows, preventing the performance degradation that often accompanies traditional scale-out approaches. Operational efficiency improvements eliminate redundant systems and reduce operational overhead through unified management interfaces, allowing IT teams to focus on strategic AI enablement rather than basic infrastructure maintenance.

Building an AI Factory with NVIDIA and NetApp: Validated multitenant solutions for enterprise scale

NVIDIA and NetApp provide validated multitenant architectures for enterprise AI. NetApp storage works with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD clusters systems to deliver scalable infrastructure for modern AI needs. Built-in features enable multitenancy, centralized control, and cross-team governance while maintaining security. This setup breaks down silos and enhances collaboration between teams.

Resource optimization maximizes AI infrastructure ROI. Optimized storage means that data access never bottlenecks accelerated computing across concurrent workloads. The system supports simultaneous AI training and inference without performance issues. Breaking down silos improves efficiency, while isolation mechanisms maintain consistent performance for all workloads.

Multitenant architecture simplifies AI factory operations. Unified management serves multiple stakeholders with consistent performance and procedures. Teams focus on AI initiatives rather than on infrastructure management, accelerating innovation. Shared infrastructure optimizes costs by eliminating redundancy and maximizing utilization. The system enables seamless scaling from pilots to enterprise-wide deployment without redesign.

The future of enterprise AI infrastructure

Multitenant AI infrastructure represents more than just resource sharing—it transforms AI from isolated experiments into enterprise-wide strategic capability that can drive competitive advantage. The NetApp and NVIDIA collaboration delivers the multitenant intelligence that makes AI infrastructure a true shared enterprise service, providing consistent performance for all stakeholders while reducing operational complexity and TCO.

Purpose-built multitenant architecture consistently outperforms fragmented solutions when AI becomes central to business operations, providing the scalability, reliability, and performance consistency that enterprise AI initiatives require. As AI factories become the hub of enterprise AI activity, multitenant intelligence becomes the foundation that enables organization-wide AI success, supporting everything from research and development to production deployment and business intelligence applications.

Getting started

To get started, learn more about NetApp AI solutions.

Take the first steps to becoming an AI expert by completing the AI Maturity self-assessment.

Mackinnon Giddings

Mackinnon joined NetApp and the Solutions Marketing team in 2020. In her time, she has focused on Enterprise Applications and Virtualization, but uncovered a passion in Artificial Intelligence and Analytics. In her current role as a Marketing Specialist, Mackinnon strives to push messaging and solutions that focus on the intersection of authentic human experience and innovative technology. With a background that spans industries like Software Development, Fashion, and small business operations, Mackinnon approaches AI topics with a fresh, outsider perspective. Mackinnon holds a Masters of Business Administration from the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She continues to live in Colorado with an often sleeping greyhound and a growing collection of empty Margaux bottles.

View all Posts by Mackinnon Giddings

Next Steps

Drift chat loading