What’s next for AI in Federal?

SC25 wrapped up just before Thanksgiving, and our Federal team was out in full force, talking with federal agencies, research institutions, and partners who are pushing the limits of HPC and AI. The conversations coming out of the show made one thing clear: agencies are facing unprecedented data complexity as AI moves from experimentation to mission execution.

This is where NetApp truly shines.

NetApp has always been at the forefront of many critical IT transformations—virtualization, big data, cloud. You name it. Now that AI is top of mind for customers worldwide, including federal government agencies, NetApp is once again on the cutting edge with new solutions such as AI Data Engine (AIDE) and the AFX storage platform.

An incredible 99% of government leaders agree that investing in safe and effective AI is essential to fulfilling their mission. Yet, 85% of AI projects fail. It’s easy to blame AI failure on technology, but the truth lies in the data. To be mission-ready, your data needs to be AI-ready. And that’s where NetApp really shines.

When government agencies begin implementing AI technologies, one of the first things they notice is that their data is scattered. It’s also growing in volume and velocity. Within the next decade, I am confident we’ll begin to see exabyte-scale workloads, particularly in AI. AI thrives on vast volumes of data. But if you have petabytes of data that you can’t easily move, manage, or govern, you can’t fully use it. To be able to feed that data into your AI pipelines, you must know what it is and be able to access it easily.

The NetApp AIDE is specifically designed for integrated AI data pipelines. AIDE automatically curates your metadata, so no matter where your data is, it will understand and collect information on that data in real time, so you can better use that data for AI workloads.

This classification capability works in a dark-site configuration by default, so SaaS connectivity is not required. Real-time data synchronization identifies changes to keep your data current and eliminate redundancies, improving the accuracy of training models. Especially relevant for our federal customers: Policy-driven data guardrails and controls enable governance and security. In contrast, automated model and data versioning provide full explainability and audit readiness for more responsible AI.

With AIDE, you don’t have to have all your data in one location to manage your AI data pipelines. NetApp’s “metadata fabric” creates a global namespace across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, letting you collapse silos and access all data securely through a unified view.

NetApp AFX delivers the unique capability to scale compute and storage independently. This enables you to efficiently handle massive data workloads like AI. For example, if you start running out of gas on a controller, you don’t have to add more storage, you can just add more controller nodes. If you start running out of capacity, you can just add more storage without adding unnecessary horsepower. This drives down TCO. And as federal IT budgets get tighter, this increases efficiency, making it much more affordable for government agencies to fully operationalize AI.

AFX offers intelligent data mobility and caching along with QoS policies to optimize resource utilization. The disaggregated architecture allows you to scale seamlessly without the pain of parallel file systems, giving you the freedom to optimize density with a common capacity pool that eliminates over-provisioning.

Cloud integration is important feature that distinguishes AFX from the competition. We know that sometimes cloud is a four-letter word in federal agencies. But most AI pipelines are hybrid multicloud, and sometimes the model you want to inference against is in the cloud. At that point, you must decide whether you bring your data to the model or bring your model to your data. With AFX, you have the ultimate flexibility to run your AI workloads wherever your data resides.

And when it comes to protecting your data, NetApp delivers the most secure storage on the planet. NetApp is the only enterprise storage vendor certified to store classified information (CSfC) and is validated by the NSA for security and encryption. Our solutions are NIST-aligned and include integrated ransomware protection with 99% accurate detection and Zero Trust security features. Our automated tools monitor, classify, and protect sensitive datasets to help you meet privacy and compliance regulations. All this is built-in, not bolted on after the fact.

After decades of witnessing technological evolution, I can say with confidence that NetApp AFX and AIDE are real game changers. No matter the mission your agency needs to accomplish, NetApp’s innovative, forward-looking technology enables you to leverage the power of AI by optimizing your data.

Reinventing public services? Improving operational efficiency? Keeping public health fit? Shrinking your cyberthreat target? NetApp AFX and AIDE break through the AI red tape so that you can confidently deploy safe, responsible AI to help make any mission possible.

For more information, check out the NetApp AI website.