Welcome to the age of the AI-powered enterprise

AI is having its “cloud first” moment. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.  

Enterprise leaders see AI’s transformative potential and are now beginning to mandate AI for every new initiative. Sound familiar? But the AI transition is accelerating, and the implications are even more far reaching than the cloud transition of just a few years ago. 

The organizations that will thrive in this new era understand a fundamental truth: Becoming an AI-powered enterprise requires more than raw performance. They recognize that AI is fundamentally a data challenge, and that poor data practices can derail even the most promising projects. 

Over the past year, I’ve been meeting with customers of every size across industries, and here’s what you’ve told me: You’ve been seeking a solution that erases the boundaries between the enterprise systems where your data lives and the AI infrastructure needed to unlock its value. You’re tired of the workarounds and the trade-offs of choosing between enterprise-grade capabilities and AI performance. You need both. 

Today, we’re delivering exactly that.

At the 2024 NetApp INSIGHT^® conference, we shared a bold vision: to deliver data storage infrastructure with the speed and scale to handle the most demanding AI workloads without compromising the core capabilities that enterprise customers demand. 

One year later, we’re fulfilling that promise. 

Designed to integrate into your data estate, NetApp^®AFX technology ends the compromises of bespoke “AI storage” solutions that sacrifice enterprise-grade security and capabilities for performance and scale.  

This is NetApp ONTAP built on a disaggregated architecture that lets you independently scale performance and capacity, turbocharging AI without overprovisioning. We engineered AFX applying what we have learned from the over 600 hundred customers in collaboration with NVIDIA and I am pleased to tell you that AFX is already certified for NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with NVIDIA DGX GB300 systems.

You no longer need two separate infrastructures to support your business operations and your AI aspirations. With NetApp AFX, you can run high-performance AI workloads directly on ONTAP—the same trusted platform already powering your enterprise data. NetApp’s single storage OS means AFX gets the full benefit of our R&D investment in ONTAP and the vigilant security teams that monitor NetApp AFF, ASA, and FAS systems for vulnerabilities. 

Building on ONTAP also lets us use our ultraresilient, co-engineered hardware platform, giving you confidence in a rock-solid foundation with the flexibility and performance needed for next-generation AI workloads. We’re talking about support for up to 400GbE networking to accelerate AI workflows over standard file and object protocols—eliminating the complexity of proprietary or customized file system clients from other vendors.

You need the power of HPC-class storage with the agility to adapt to rapidly evolving AI workloads without maintenance windows or performance-draining rebalancing. Our early-access customers told us they can grow their clusters as needed while AFX auto-balances resources without affecting performance. These same customers put our storage through its paces with resilience testing while under heavy I/O workloads, and we passed with flying colors. 

As you extend AI across your business, our secure multitenancy and granular quality of service enable you to scale confidently. You can rapidly onboard new applications and workflows, allocate resources with precision, and move fast, all while reducing risk. Guardrails are built in, so innovation never comes at the expense of security. 

One more thing: Because AFX is fully compatible with ONTAP APIs, the automations and provisioning that you’ve already built will continue to work. You don’t need to start from scratch, so it’s easy to apply the power of AFX exactly where you need it in your enterprise. And even if you’re new to ONTAP, there’s an extensive knowledge base created by our community of users waiting to be explored.

As enterprises embrace agentic AI, one truth is becoming clear: Security can’t be an afterthought. It must be foundational. Agentic AI systems make autonomous decisions and take actions across your business. A single breach doesn’t just expose data—it disrupts every AI-driven process, amplifying risk across the organization.  

ONTAP, the world’s most secure storage platform, gives you a strong foundation for enterprise AI. Our integrated NetApp Autonomous Ransomware Protection with AI, designed for better than 99% accuracy, keeps your datasets and models safe from even the most sophisticated threats.

Hybrid cloud operations are the norm for the modern enterprise, and you need AI everywhere your data lives. Thanks to native ONTAP integrations and first-party services on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, you can streamline your AI pipelines with unified data access across on-premises and cloud environments. This makes it simple to manage, protect, and mobilize data using ultra-efficient replication and intelligent caching. You’ll simplify operations with AIOps and get intuitive hybrid control through NetApp Console—no retraining required. 

We didn’t stop with best-in-class data management. With the NetApp AI Data Engine, data engineers get real-time metadata indexing, automated data curation, built-in privacy and compliance guardrails, and integrated vectorization to make enterprise data instantly AI-ready for GenAI applications.

If you're embarking on your AI journey, and you’ve been led to believe that a point solution is the fastest path forward, you’re already seeing some rough edges. AI is only going to become more tightly integrated into your core operations—and as this happens, the limitations of a siloed approach will become painfully clear.  
 
Let’s get ahead of these challenges right now.  

NetApp has the experience, partnerships, and integrations you need. When you combine these with architecture that’s built for the most demanding AI workloads, you have the foundation for the AI-powered enterprise.  

Let’s build together.  

Visit the NetApp AI page to explore how NetApp AFX can power your AI journey.