Redefining enterprise-grade capabilities in the AI Era
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Jeff Baxter
For over 30 years, NetApp has been at the forefront of data innovation, helping enterprises navigate seismic shifts in technology, from virtualization to the cloud. Today, we’re raising the bar yet again.
Today, we’re announcing more than 25 product and solution updates that push the boundaries of what’s possible with intelligent data infrastructure. All of these innovations matter, but a few stand out as true game changers. Let’s dive into the highlights.
AI is reshaping business, and IT infrastructure must keep up
In the AI era, enterprise customers need a secure, reliable, and efficient data infrastructure to maximize benefits. AI is no longer experimental – it’s foundational and becoming mission critical, especially in the era of agentic AI. But building and scaling AI pipelines remains complex.
From early deployments to enterprise-scale rollouts, NetApp has seen what works and what doesn’t. That experience has shaped our latest innovations, purpose-built for the AI era. All of those innovations are built on an enterprise-grade data platform ideal for AI.
The NetApp® data platform provides an integrated, resilient, and high-performance unified data foundation that accelerates data pipelines and addresses key challenges without disrupting existing systems. It integrates seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments, supporting AI innovation, plus data modernization, cyber resilience, and cloud transformation.
Introducing NetApp AFX
Meet the first enterprise-grade solution designed specifically for AI workloads: NetApp AFX. Built on a disaggregated architecture, AFX delivers the performance, flexibility, and control that modern AI demands.
The NetApp AFX AI portfolio is designed with two main components: disaggregated ONTAP® running on the new NetApp AFX 1K storage system and new data services to produce AI-Ready data via the NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE).
AIDE is an end-to-end AI data solution that makes the generation of AI-ready data simple, efficient, compliant, and secure, from ingesting to serving data to GenAI apps. It encompasses:
- NetApp Metadata Engine automatically generates and persists a structured, up-to-date, access-controlled view of a customer's NetApp data assets and associated metadata, eliminating any need to “scan” a dataset to find applicable data.
- NetApp Data Curator enables data discovery and dataset curation and transforms data in place with integrated vectorization, results reranking, and retrieval APIs.
- NetApp Data Guardrails means data privacy, security, and compliance through classifiers, data anonymization, and policy-based guardrail enforcement.
Together, AFX and AIDE form the backbone of a scalable, secure, and efficient, enterprise-grade AI pipeline.
Additionally, the new NetApp Keystone® Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) for Enterprise AI will deliver all the benefits of NetApp’s AFX architecture in a single consumption-based subscription model. In other words, all the benefits of enterprise data AI without all the setup.
FlexPod AI with NetApp AFX® marks a significant evolution in NetApp’s converged infrastructure offering. This validated solution seamlessly integrates the NetApp AFX architecture for enterprise AI with Cisco UCS and Nexus platforms, as well as Cisco’s Secure AI framework, delivering a flexible, secure, full-stack foundation for hybrid cloud and AI workloads.
AI and the cloud: Native integration where it matters
A large amount of AI innovation takes place in the public cloud. ONTAP is the only unified data operating system that spans on premises and is natively integrated in the three largest public clouds. This capability means that NetApp is in a unique position to allow customers to apply any major AI models of their choosing to their data – without the hassles and complexities of moving it.
The cloud is essential to AI, but not all cloud integrations are created equal. NetApp is expanding its native AI capabilities in Azure and Google Cloud, in addition to what is already available in Amazon Web Services, giving customers the flexibility to run AI workloads wherever it makes the most sense.
With this launch, new seamless integration with Azure AI Services allows any data on NetApp ONTAP on premises or in the cloud – including in Azure NetApp Files – to be exposed to the wide array of industry-leading Azure AI Services. Additionally, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes enhances integration with Google Cloud AI applications by enabling direct use of data as a native source, allowing users to build custom agents without requiring custom code or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.
This launch follows our recent Amazon Elastic VMware Service support for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Today, FSx for ONTAP delivers a scalable, high-performance external datastore for Amazon EVS. It can be used as an external storage option for Amazon EVS, so you can migrate and operate VMware-based workloads in AWS, maintaining operational consistency by using the same VCF and NetApp ONTAP tools that you use on your premises today.
Read more about our latest cloud storage innovations.
More innovations across the portfolio
We’re also delivering powerful updates across our product portfolio.
- NetApp Ransomware Resilience. The enhanced Ransomware Resilience service adds two powerful capabilities to complement NetApp’s leading AI-powered ransomware detection as part of the most secure storage on the planet with data breach detection and an isolated recovery environment.
- Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. The Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex service level now provides unified storage that supports both NAS (NFS/SMB) and SAN (iSCSI) protocols. In addition, it offers integrated hybrid data mobility with NetApp SnapMirror® and FlexCache®.
- NetApp Shift Toolkit. The newly enhanced NetApp Shift Toolkit empowers virtualization flexibility, which enables customers to near-instantaneously reformat virtual machines to shift from one hypervisor to another without needing to copy data. The new version of the toolkit introduces bidirectional migration for VMware and Hyper-V, and adds support for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Proxmox, Oracle Linux VM, XCP-ng, and CloudStack, dramatically increasing customers’ choices as they modernize their data centers.
This launch reinforces NetApp’s vision to be the platform for intelligent data infrastructure. Whether you're modernizing your data center, scaling AI, or transforming in the cloud, NetApp is the partner that gets you there – faster, smarter, and more securely.
That’s not all. Explore even more updates in NetApp’s portfolio:
Intelligent data infrastructure, evolved
See the full set of announcements from NetApp INSIGHT® 2025 and discover how NetApp is helping customers like you build the future of intelligent data infrastructure.
Jeff Baxter
Jeff Baxter is Vice President, Product Marketing at NetApp. In this role, Jeff leads the team responsible for core product & solutions marketing at NetApp. Previously, Jeff has held a variety of technical and strategy roles at NetApp, including serving Sr. Director of Product Management for ONTAP, Chief Evangelist for ONTAP, and Field Chief Technology Officer for the Americas at NetApp.
