Pranoop Erasani is vice president of engineering in the Shared Platform team at NetApp, where he is responsible for AI/ML, NAS, and replication technologies for NetApp’s hybrid cloud storage platform, ONTAP. In this role, he is tasked with building a cost-effective next-generation ONTAP data platform optimized for AI/ML applications. Leveraging the best of ONTAP data management capabilities, the next-generation data platform for AI/ML will not only be optimized for all AI workflows of training, inference, and checkpointing, it will also provide the ability to make data ready for AI/ML applications natively on storage.