BlueXP is now NetApp Console
Monitor and run hybrid cloud data services
It starts here. This is the place where trust is earned. Innovation thrives. This is the moment where data fuels possibility. The future we're building for you. The future we're building with you. Our commitment to making data the foundation of transformation. This is the place. It all comes together here, where our future Welcome,to Insight 2025. Please welcome our host, Mario Armstrong. Let's do this. Welcome,everyone. So glad that you're here for Insight 2025, or as I like to think of it, the house that innovation built because for more than 30 years you all, NetApp, you have been doing just that: building, creating, evolving with you, and today that innovation, that intelligence, that partnership, it all comes together right here under this one roof. So the doors are open, the lights are on, the house is full, and we are so glad that you are here. And now, since this is something that we've been building together, it's obviously not my house, it's your house, it's our house. So when I say whose house, I want you to say our house. Whose house? That's right. NetApp, bring it. Welcome home and welcome to Insight 2025. Before we go any further, I have an important message that I have to bring to your attention now. It's gonna be all up on the screen for you to read, but I can sum it up for you. Please remember that some of what you're about to see on the headliner stage is really vision content. In other words, it's for informational purposes. Only the details are subject to change. OK, now let's get rolling. You know, every year I get so inspired by all the great people that I meet here. Some of you have been DMing me, some of you have been hitting me up on LinkedIn and Instagram. I can't wait to see you and hug you and take some selfies and get to learn more about what you're doing. And this year I decided that I wanted to take that inspiration and try something a little different. I thought about all the great stuff that's coming up this week, all the things that you're going to be able to experience and take part in. And I worked it into a little poem that I wrote specifically for you all and for the occasion. Ah yes, I need my poem jacket, thank you. Little poetry jacket there. Thank you so much. Let's set the stage, shall we? Uh, yeah, that feels right. Oh wait, there's one thing that's missing. I gotta set the vibe. Let's set the vibe with some.LED shoes. There we go. Let's do that, right? Now I feel like, OK, now I feel like I'm part of that, and I'm here and I'm ready to go. All right. DJ Graffiti, you got something to back me up here? I got you. Thank you, sir. NetApp's the engine that keeps us on track. Cyber resilience guarding each stack from on-prem rooms to hyperscale skies. We move data that helps you rise. And if you didn't know by now, we're NetApp. We've won the industry prize. We're number one in the magic quadrant race, customer's choice. We set the pace. Every workload finds its place: protected, efficient, a seamless space. My name is Mario Armstrong. You've seen me before at Past Insights, NetApp shows, and plenty more. Maybe you caught me on the Today Show feed or online where I break tech down at speed. This is the place where ideas and data grow. We'll hear from George Kurian, Sean Nair, and Gaby Boko, and that's just the beginning. Trust my word. We've got featured sessions that must be heard. Hands-on lab certifications too. Camp Cloud is calling. It's built just for you, but wait, we're not done. The festival grounds has all the fun. It's huge, it's buzzing, a sight to see, innovation and energy in full harmony. And rumor has it, I'll give you a little hint there's a special unveiling coming. Don't miss that event. Quick shout out to everyone watching online. You're part of this energy too. You're right on time. When this session wraps, don't drift away because Nick Howell's postgame show is ready to play. He's got recaps, guests, and more in store, so click that link and stay for the encore. This isn't just power; it's purpose in motion, secure as a fortress, fluid as an ocean. So let's ignite this room and find our drive. This is NetApp Insight 2025. Now this house is heating up fast, and the moment we've waited for is here at last. He's leading the charge and he's setting the tone. Rise up and make some noise, everyone, for NetApp's own CEO George Kurian. Good morning. Welcome to Insight, Mario. Thank you for that awesome set of lyrics. Super excited to have you here. We have an exciting agenda for the next three days to show you how NetApp can help you unlock the full potential of your data.comes from the Latin word datum. Meaning a single fact, an observation, the truth. The truth that can unite us. At a time of so much division. Data is not an abstract concept; it's personal. The first picture a mother has of her child is data. And data is the foundation of knowledge because data, when placed alongside other data, can be synthesized into knowledge, and it is precisely in pursuit of knowledge that humankind has recorded data for over 35,000 years to share our stories. To bring forward traditions and to help us understand ourselves and each other better. And we have built ever more powerful tools to analyze that data. To create knowledge, and today we stand at a moment with the most powerful tools we've ever had, a moment of extraordinary promise. If we can unlock the full potential of data. For NetApp, this has been a 30-year journey of innovation. We have worked with organizations like yourselves on data problems for many years. We created the first networked file system in the world to enable work groups to share data and collaborate on complex projects. It was the first disaggregation of storage from computing that the world had ever seen. We created the ability to consolidate data across multiple applications with the first unified data storage system. And when all of you decided that you wanted to leverage the innovation and services of the public clouds, we created a hybrid cloud data fabric that allowed you to seamlessly integrate all those landscapes. And by doing so and working with our partners, we made ONTAP the world's most widely deployed operating system, the most advanced, the most secure, the most proven and trusted operating system in the world, period. We have also worked hard. To help you meet big moments. And in doing so, we have earned your trust. Thank you for it. Like when we worked with the European Space Agency. In the mapping of the Milky Way. And the discovery of 1 billion new stars. To help mankind go further in our imagination and understanding than ever before. We worked with the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility. To achieve nuclear fusion ignition. Promising limitless clean energy for everyone. And of course, I work with DreamWorks. The animated movie production studio. To create Shrek, the winner of the first Oscar for best animated motion picture. Bringing joy to families around the world. In each of these cases, there were enormously large data sets that needed to be managed in extraordinarily short time windows. With no chance of mistakes. And working with you, we proved that we were more than ready for that challenge. One of the important things that we've done over our 30-year history. Is to co-innovate with the industry's leaders. What this should give you confidence in is that it is not just NetApp innovating to build capabilities for you, but we're doing that in partnership with so many of the world's leaders. And this gives you a multiple return on investment in NetApp. Don't take that from me. Let's roll the video. Hello to everyone at NetApp Insight 2025. Our partnership with NetApp goes back 12 years now, and together we've helped countless customers use their data to innovate and solve really complex storage challenges. But frankly, this is more than just a partnership. Our two companies actually co-invent solutions together. Take, for example, Amazon FSX for NetApp ONTAP. It's the first and only cloud storage service that gives customers a fully featured, fully managed ONTAP experience in the cloud. Now, what's great about this is that customers can migrate their workloads to AWS without having to change anything about their application or how they manage their data. Now when you combine that with Amazon's Elastic VMware service, you get the fastest path to migrate VMware workloads quickly to AWS, and that's just the beginning. These solutions let you connect your enterprise data with leading AI models and AWS AI services and really allow you to drive real innovation from your customer data. Look, the bottom line is this. When you need solutions that can both sustain and innovate for your business, AWS and NetApp help you scale—all without constraints. That is what happens when you truly co-invent together. Now, thanks everyone, and enjoy NetApp Insight. Thank you, Matt. Thank you to the AWS team for the partnership and for the commitment of co-innovating together. You will see awesome innovations in our show floors of how NetApp and AWS are co-innovating to make better solutions for you. So here we are at the start of the era of data- enabled intelligence. And today we're going to show you how you can unlock the full power of your data as knowledge to transform your business. And how you and your organizations will become leaders in the era of data-enabled intelligence. McKinsey and so many others have said that artificial intelligence can enable you to unlock massive amounts of productivity and growth for your organizations. The key to doing so is to unlock the knowledge that's hidden in the data that's spread across your organization in so many technological silos as well as organizational silos. Now with multimodal and large language models, you can analyze all of your enterprise's data, especially the 80 to 85% of it that's unstructured data. And this is broadly called inferencing and is where the real value of AI lies. While the power of data to enable success with AI is irrefutable, It is also the most complex issue to deal with. See, the challenge that you have to deal with is that the raw data generated from your enterprise applications is not AI ready. And it is very hard to transform the raw data to AI ready data securely, efficiently, and simply. In many discussions with you, as well as surveys done by companies like IDC, 80% of the time. That's right, 80% of the time in an AI project is spent in data wrangling. Don't worry, that's what we're going to help you with. So let's talk about what it takes to do those steps to take raw data and make it AI ready. It's a set of steps called a data pipeline. The first step is to organize your data. You need to discover it, classify it, and align it with the communities that form the AI projects in your enterprise. You need to deal with the fact that AI has enormous gravity and is constantly being generated. Second, you need to implement data governance mechanisms, security, access controls, privacy, maintaining the lineage of data. You have it for your raw data, you need to carry it forward to your AI ready data as you move it through the pipeline. Third, you need to leverage metadata, which is data about data. As data grows, you increasingly rely on metadata to accomplish the actions that I've described. This is called Varian's Law after Hal Varian of Berkeley, who said that when data becomes huge, information of the data about the data becomes essential to managing it well. And you will need to evolve metadata from passive to active. Passive metadata is static descriptions of data like file name and author. Active metadata is dynamic, having information that must be harvested, enriched with context, and synchronized as its data changes. Once you've accomplished those steps, you are now ready to process and transform your data. You need to ensure it's efficient transformation from documents, videos, images, audios into what's called vector embeddings so that it can be processed by an AI model. A vector embedding is a numerical representation of data. That captures its semantic meaning and relationships with other data in a multi-dimensional space. By converting unstructured data like video and audio into these vectorized embeddings, you can actually get AI models to understand and interpret them so that you can enable applications like semantic search or recommendation engines and so on. This is where raw data becomes AI-ready data. Now that you've done these four steps, rinse and repeat. You've got to do it every time the data changes across the lifecycle of the business process and the data in your organizations. Let's look at how that gets done today. Consider a large pharmaceutical company looking to connect clinical data and research data to accelerate drug discovery. This is true for any organization in any industry for that matter. You copy data of different types showing up on the left into an application like an annotation application so that you can create the rich, enriched metadata for it. Then you copy it into. Um, data warehouse or data lake, and then you copy it into vector database and so on.average, there are six copies of data. That's right, six copies of data for each pass through a data pipeline. And that level of complexity causes you to have expensive, inefficient, brittle; that means prone to mistakes, insecure data pipelines. And so you might ask, hey, so why does it not work? It's because the approach that you're taking was set up for another class of applications, traditional big data analytic applications, not set up for the needs of unstructured data and AI applications. Let's talk about that. It's centralized and batch mode, saying that inferencing happens only in one place. It works against data gravity. You're copying enormous volumes of data as we talked about: complex, expensive, inefficient. And is set up for structured data where the schema was well defined, where the rate of change was low and the amount of transformation required was limited. That's not the case with unstructured data or AI capabilities. And finally, as we described, everything that you've done for raw data, your enterprise data, access control, security, governance, lineage gets blown up as you move it through this giant, complex, inefficient data pipeline. So now let's talk about what's our vision for how to solve that problem. You need a unified data platform, and architecture that supports enterprise Data operations on traditional data formats, files, blocks, and objects. Metadata operations on canonical data formats which provide structure over unstructured data, and a four-way method to harmonize operations across structured, semi-structured and unstructured data types. And finally, Gen AI and AI agent-driven retrieval operations on embeddings and tokenized data formats. While the representations of data in many formats are set up for different applications accessing that data, the source data, meaning the raw data underpinning those representations and retrieval methods, remains the same. This makes it efficient, secure, and simple to build an AI data pipeline. Like the centralized approach, the unified data platform provides you with a single unified data model that brings together all the disparate sources of data into a common taxonomy. But unlike centralized processing, it consists of distributed data operations for transforming and enriching your data wherever it is created and in place. A federated active metadata fabric that presents a coherent unified view of your entire data estate across the hybrid cloud wherever your data is, all supported by a foundation of high performance, secure, compliant, unified data storage. You can massively simplify all your operations. So you might say, awesome George, that sounds great. How do you get me there? So let's talk about how we get you there. Three ways. First, leveraging technology trends that enable us to have new opportunities to solve the problem. Second, innovating with new capabilities that we will show you today. And third, building upon proven foundations that we've already made available to you. Let's start with technology trends. Over the past few years, we have been able to build composable system architectures leveraging memory speed connectivity across network fabrics that allow you to assemble disaggregated pools of processing, memory, and storage as you need it, when you need it. This capability allows you to now leverage this aggregation so that you can integrate computation close to data. Something that we call near data compute. And what we referred to last year when we said, rather than bring your data to AI. We're going to bring AI to your data. Stay tuned. And then the third is the development of standardized canonical data representations, such as file formats like Parquet and Avro, open table formats like Iceberg tables, and standardized processing engines like Spark and Trino. Now let's talk about how we're innovating our strategy for the NetApp data platform. Three unique capabilities that we are bringing to market. And enabling for you in a way that no one else has. First, high performance, scalable, unified data storage. Today we are introducing a new class of data infrastructure system. We move beyond the traditional definition of a data storage system with a composable disaggregated architecture that unifies data storage and retrieval. With data transformation and processing and enrichment, in one logical system. We combine data access nodes, like our state-of- the-art all flash controllers with data processing nodes, like GPUs, with a shared pool of storage connected with the high-speed network fabric. And we do so within the trust boundary of data access. So that all of your controls and security and permissions are preserved as you transform your data. The Unified Storage Foundation is infused with ONTAP's proven intelligence like unified protocols, security, multi-tenancy, caching movers, change detection, synchronization, all of ONTAP's awesome goodness is available as part of the best foundation for a data platform in the industry. Second, we are introducing a metadata engine. This is a smart software engine that's integrated with the ONTAP OS and it helps you build, like I said, an active catalog of your data. Together with custom annotations and tagging, while leaving the data in place. By integrating our metadata engine with ONTAP's change detection and synchronization engine, we keep the metadata synchronized as the data changes. Active metadata. Yes, it's true that this is particularly useful for AI applications, but every single NetApp customer is able to use our metadata capabilities to unify their data in ways that were never possible, to align their data with the data communities that use that data and to manage it efficiently across its life cycle. Third, leveraging the metadata engine, we've developed a suite of software capabilities that enable you to discover and classify your data, implement guardrails, process and transform your data from raw data to AI ready data in place alongside your raw data and across the hybrid cloud. We support data and metadata-associated vector embeddings and tokens for unstructured data today, and we will soon enable open table formats for structured and semi-structured data and semantic relationships co-located and co-addressed for all of your data. And we do that with zero copies and entirely with open standards, and everywhere you have your data, by bringing AI to your data. Now that we've built the three awesome building blocks for a data platform, we're going to unify that across all of the places where you have your data to give you a single coherent view of your entire data landscape. We will create an active metadata fabric to enable a global namespace aligned with your data communities. Federated controls, you know, as agentic AI becomes more prevalent, we envision a control plane having a set of intelligent data agents that can reason against your data and enrich metadata. These data agents provide data access, context and summarization of your data and will interact with your application and workflow agents through standard protocols like A2A and MCP. And underpinning all of this control plane. is a knowledge graph which helps you understand how your data entities are related. And what those relationships mean. What we are able to do then. is to do for you and your organization's data, what Google did for the internet's data. Harmonize it, unify it, and give you the ability to understand your data and transform it into knowledge to power your business. You see, the NetApp data platform enables you to go from raw data to AI ready data, simply without copies and without mistakes, we enable a data fabric and a complementary metadata fabric. We enable unified data storage and a unified data platform and a unified data model for your business so that you can find your data, unify, organize, and properly govern it while transforming it. Into the applications that you want to use for your business. No one else is able to deliver that. So let's take a picture of what that looks like because. We're not just doing it one time. We're building on trusted foundations. You see, what NetApp's history has been is not throwing away stuff that you bought from us and saying, here's a clean sheet, new idea. We are building on a trusted foundation. The best solutions for data infrastructure modernization. Number one in all flash storage. Thank you. Number one operating system. Giving you the efficiency of the world's biggest hyperscalers for your data center. We have the most secure storage in the world, the only operating system that is certified to cover all the elements of the NIST data life cycle to detect, protect, and recover from cyber threats, and we are continuing to advance the horizons in that area. And we are the only company in the world that can build you a truly hybrid cloud data fabric across all the places that you have your data. And with all of that value, everything that we have sold you before, we are now giving you the number one platform for the era of data intelligence and to help you use the advanced AI capabilities that exist in the market with your data. Now like all other journeys before, the best journeys are never accomplished alone. They're always accomplished in partnership with industry leaders, and today we've been fortunate to work with some of the industry's leading icons who are defining what AI means. I recently had a conversation with our longtime partner Jenn Huang at Nvidia, and I'd like to share a snippet of that with you. Let's take a look. Today is such a big day. I'm so happy to be at NetApp Insight, and this is a, it's a huge day because we're announcing a revolutionary product at a revolutionary time. Exactly, you know, this is, um, uh, we've been working together now for so long. DGX1 was the world's first AI supercomputer, and it was connected to NetApp. And we use NetApp all over our company. I love the fact that you are multi-cloud and you're a hybrid cloud. With one basic platform, you could manage your storage, you can manage all of your company's data from structured to object to files, multimedia, multimodal data now, like today, today's world is complicated. It's exactly insanely complicated, and the vast majority of our data is actually multimedia and multimodal. And so that's got to be 90% of Nvidia's data. It's unstructured. And now, with NetApp, we can manage that coherently. You know, across all of the clouds and,hybrid cloud. And the,thing that's really,exciting is that, today we're announcing a dream come true for both of us. What we're announcing today, bringing our two companies' technologies together, is exactly that. How do you bring accelerated computing technologies and your software stack for AI data platform together with NetApp technologies? So we're really excited; it's groundbreaking. It allows us to bring our mission of helping our clients get knowledge from the vast amount of data that we store for them. AI is reinventing computing as we know it. And then today, we're reinventing storage, that's AI for the very first time. And this is such a big deal. I'm excited that it's reinventing both of our companies, and it's, as you know, the biggest industrial revolution the world's ever seen. This is a complete reset of the computer industry. And it's created a huge opportunity for me. I think it's gonna create a huge opportunity for you, and this partnership has been a great joy for me. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Our clients will be excited to see much more co-innovation from us going forward. Thank you. Congratulations on the launch. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jenn, and to all of the Nvidia team. I know many of you are here. We appreciate the partnership and know that together we are going to deliver the best solutions for this era of data-enabled intelligence. Now I want to bring on stage our new leader of product development who brings deep experience in product innovation, with a strong heritage in dealing with exactly these data challenges. And a commitment to driving innovative solutions for you, our clients. We're so excited to have him at NetApp. I want to welcome our new chief product officer, Shiam Nair. Thank you, George. Thank you. T, welcome to NetApp and also to your first Insight. I'm super excited to have you. I'm super excited to be here with all of you. Thank you, George, for the opportunity. Look, we have heard this from our customers, industry analysts, from partners. Having AI-ready data is a challenge. Having the right data infrastructure is a challenge. We have solutions, so I'm excited to be here with you. Sham, you've worked at leading organizations like Salesforce and Zscaler and Microsoft, and you've dealt with these, you know, data challenges before. Tell us a little bit about your history dealing with them and what lessons you've learned from it. We're happy to. I think this is the same challenge that we have seen across industries, and every enterprise faces. If you talk about Salesforce building a data cloud bringing together structured and unstructured data. Harmonizing, modeling, creating those personalized outcomes, those are intelligent outcomes. Today it's the foundation for Age and Force. Zscaler, not a different story, creating a data fabric, a single source of truth for security data for proactive, secure outcomes, secure communications, proactive security. These are monumental engineering challenges that these teams had to overcome. Look, we talk about this today. You talked about the complex pipeline. We have messy pipelines out there. Data gets copied, moved across, updates lag, schemas drift, lineage is lost. Intelligent outcomes cannot be driven out of stale data. Talk about silos: every department, every team, every application has its data silos. Access is hard. You don't have context around this data. How do you build intelligent outcomes when data is not connected and complete, and George, you talked about the infrastructure. The infrastructure of today is not built for production AI. It's built for pilots, scale, reliability, resilience, security controls. These are missing. These need an intelligent data infrastructure, but George, you know this. I just don't need to repeat. We have been hard at work building this. We have this, and I will be excited to show this to the team. Over to you. We got some awesome stuff that Sham will show you. Take it away. Thank you, George. Thank you. First, thank you for 30+ years of partnership. It's been an honor driving the backbone of the digital era with you. Now we get to supercharge it for the AI era. You all know this.is not new. Hybrid cloud is the norm today. Unstructured data is exploding. It's a big challenge, and it's also a big,opportunity for every one of us here. As storage and data teams, you make AI real. You are the ones who can cater to models, reasoning, inference, unlock the value of data, the AI for your organizations, your clients, and your customers. Our commitment here at NetApp is that promise of intelligent data infrastructure, a unified data platform bringing together files, blocks, and objects, all connected to AI across major clouds and on-premises, industry-leading data services including AI-powered protection inbuilt, plus a few other new ones that we'll talk about today. This is intelligence providing an intelligent experience; you can deploy it as a service, a unified control plane, full support for open source ecosystem, as well as a broad system of partners. You know, the data platform from NetApp simplifies data readiness. It cuts operational costs, infrastructure costs, delivers the real fuel for AI, which is data. A unified enterprise-grade foundation for the promise of intelligent data infrastructure. Look, from your CEOs to data scientists, everyone becomes your champion. Why? Because you are the ones, you are the only ones with AI-ready data. You can turn AI from pilots to production. Data to business outcomes. Our goal, our simple goal is to help you on four fronts. Number one, data infrastructure, modernize it, cut costs, boost efficiency. Number two, AI. Everybody talks about AI. You need to drive the value for AI faster outcomes. Number three, cloud transformation. Cloud is part of everybody's journey. Seamlessly adopt the cloud on your terms, flexibility, scalability, and finally, top of mind for all of us, cyber resilience built in to protect your data from ever growing threats. Let's start with data infrastructure modernization. This is a critical imperative for every enterprise. Mission-critical AI often demands enterprise great resilience and performance. Now, one would say we have always been doing this. In fact, NetApp's platform is known for that, but AI does raise the bar. Extra scale demands and performance and capacity where you need to linearly scale, independently scale. You know, when you talk to others, some people say let's build new stacks or bolt on OEM software. How many of you have tried new stacks and bolt on OEM software without the foundational fundamental capabilities of data management and made it work? It doesn't. It doesn't work. That's why we built a disaggregated architecture from the ground up, built on the ONTAP platform to meet the new demands with enterprise resilience, security, and performance built in, all the ONTAP capabilities, all the ONTAP capabilities and data management capabilities that you have loved and relied on. It's purpose-built on the ONTAP platform. Are you ready to see what we've got here? Let's just sit, do this. Well, there you go. It's my pleasure to introduce NetApp AFX. This is a disaggregated storage platform built for the AI-ready enterprise. As I said, it includes all the power of OnTap but with massive scale. And the ability to scale performance and capacity independently. You know, one would ask how much scale. This is OnTap for the exabyte era. And guess what? Our partners at Nvidia took a look at this, certified it for the super pod. You know, I would like to call it. It's AI factory ready out of the gate. You know, I like the sound of it that I want to say it again. It is AI factory with storage right out of the gate. Thank you. Let me explain why we talk about our disaggregated architecture and talk about this as the different one, best in the world. Inside NetApp, we call every disaggregated architecture, this one as the 3rd generation one. It's a quick trivia. I don't know how many of you know this. We were the first to actually split the controller from storage. One would say the OG of disaggregated architecture. We started it, but now we are reinventing it for the AI era. First gen disaggregated storage uses shared nothing designs. Flash was expensive; it changed the game. The model became expensive to scale. Now we have the 2nd generation one where compute and storage were disaggregated, but they lack a proven track record and a robust data management like OnTap. They cannot be used for modern data center modernization. So NetApp reinvented our disaggregated storage built for exabyte scale. Best in class performance, best in class resiliency. OnTap, built OnTap data management capabilities, security, multi-tenancy. Let's take an example. A retail giant often runs multiple AI models on massive data sets. Flex clone plus AFX create instant zero copy data set clones. AI development and AI deployment is much faster. Why? Because AFX helps scale performance and capacity independently. Optimize cost and efficiency. This enables you to have faster time to value with AI ready data. I like to call this disaggregated to accelerate, scale what you need, when you need it, where you need it. Would you like to see NetApp AFX up close? I think a lot of you would like to, and even hug it, right? There's a live unveiling by Sandeep Singh, our GM in the festival grounds, and I'm told you'll actually hug it. This is perfect photo moment for all you OGs out there. The GOAT of disaggregated architecture is here today, and you can use it. Now let's turn our attention to AI. We talked about AI, we talked about AI pipelines. George showed how cluttered the pipelines are, how they are a bottleneck. Storage needs to be AI ready. We are fixing it, fixing it with an accelerated AI data pipeline. What is an accelerated AI pipeline? It's an advanced engine. George talked about the metadata engine built into the NetApp AI data platform, runs on NetApp AFX to make all your data, all of your data AI ready out of the box, and we built it. Are you ready to hear more about this? I'm super happy to talk about the NetApp AI Data Engine. The NetApp AI data engine is simple, affordable, secure. You get one global up-to-date view of your entire NetApp data estate. Fast search and curation. Connects to any model, any AI tool on premises or cloud. Ingest, prepare, serve your AI workloads in place, no ETL, no harmonization, and no drama. This is semantics out of the box, metadata engine, vectorization, guardrails all built into the platform. Auto detect changes, synchronize in place, cut all the redundant copies. The guardrails prevent you, protect you, provide the security, privacy, and governance. Let's take an example, a media and entertainment company. AID helps unify assets, scripts, and rights and analytics all in place, as I said, zero copy, no ETL. The built-in semantics, auto tag, and create context for rights as well as content, enabling faster promos, clearance, localization. You know this is the power of AFX for disaggregated. It is a turnkey solution, not just for today but future-proof. With NetApp AID, your data is AI ready. As I said, no ETL harmonization, complex modeling, cutting costs and complexity, but at the same time delivering faster, more efficient outcomes. AID is built into the NetApp data platform. This is intelligence everywhere, intelligence built in, not bolted on. Any app, any workload, any data. Anywhere, NetApp AID and the NetApp data platform are available. One cohesive platform enabling the future of intelligent data infrastructure. To see more about the NetApp AI Data Engine and how it works and get into the details, please head to the featured session where we'll share more details as well as on the show floor. Now, we covered AFX, AID, talked about modernizing data centers, talked about how you drive AI outcomes. Cloud is an important part of this journey. It's a journey where for every workload, especially AI, it's how modern enterprises get the flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency. NetApp is the only one with a full platform, full data infrastructure on every major cloud, every major cloud and on-premises, providing you the customer, the choice. It's one experience, one control plane, but anywhere. We have been jointly innovating with our hyperscaler cloud partners for a while. Let's talk about one joint innovation here. This is from Google. We are happy to announce that Google Cloud NetApp volumes now support block storage capabilities, unifying NFS and SAN protocols. This new capability enables Google customers with today's most important data workloads, virtualized environments, self-managed databases, or new AI innovation. We have always had such a great relationship with Google, and this joint innovation is just a testament to that. Let's take a listen to how we innovate together. It's great to join you at NetApp Insight. Google Cloud and NetApp have a longstanding partnership focused on helping companies solve their toughest data challenges in the AI era. Earlier this year at Google Cloud Next we announced that you can build AI agents directly on your enterprise data stored in Google Cloud NetApp volumes. GCNV allows you to scale capacity with more flexibility to protect your data and to optimize your costs with autotiering. Today I'm thrilled to announce we're making this even more powerful by integrating GCNV as a native data source within Gemini Enterprise which is now available in preview. This reduces AI deployment time from months to just minutes. All of this innovation is helping customers like GSK accelerate the clinical research and pathology platform up to 3 times faster. ISVs such as OpenText and Zebra are also leveraging GCNV to better serve their customers. We're also increasing customer migrations to Google Cloud by providing the same capabilities they have on their premises. Today we're opening up new block storage functionality on GCNV for select customers and to all customers in the coming months. Together with NetApp we're helping you unlock the full power of your data and to innovate faster with AI. Thank you so very much for the partnership. Thank you, Thomas. And the entire Google Cloud team. You know, that video not only brought excitement in the audience, but a smile. I'm happy for that. Finally, something super powerful that shows the true power of our platform, the ONTAP platform. Giving you the flexibility regarding choices of the cloud. As you might know, FSxN in AWS already supports FlexCache and SnapMirror capabilities, but now Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and Azure NetApp Files also support that natively. What does this enable you? Link your data across on-prem and every cloud, a global namespace on the unified data plane. The vision that George talked about, it's a reality spanning all major clouds and on-premises. It's the true promise of the unified Data Foundation that we've been talking about. FlexCache indeed creates something really amazing. Take a look at the screen. This,is FlexCache in action. One data set, four places: FSxN, GCNV, ANF, and AFF. I drop a file in any one of them within seconds it shows up everywhere regardless of the size, and we are not copying the data unless it's Needed, but it's smart caching, enabling read-write so teams can work independently, locally, but have the global consistency. There are no external appliances here. There's no gateways, no synthetic file system. It's native in each cloud service, built into ONTAP, and there's no additional cost. Who else can do this? No one else is even close to having a platform like this across on-prem and the largest clouds. Now imagine an EDA workload. They are well known for using design teams, bursting SIMs in AWS, maybe managing storage in Azure using AI optimization in Google Cloud. You'd update a design once, instantly available everywhere. Fewer copies or no copy, less friction, faster tape out. True value to you from the platform. This is a bold claim, but I'll make it. NetApp ONTAP and our data platform is the only hyperscale and neutral, cloud-first, intelligent data infrastructure. It is the only one. Let's not talk about cyber resilience. It's the fourth core imperative. It's top of mind for all of us. More often than not, everybody cares about it one way or another, but AI raises exposure. Attackers use AI to attack your systems. Models memorize pipelines and ingest data. Your most precious asset is data. It's often the target. Resilience is no longer a checkbox, it's a continuous posture. Built into the NetApp data platform are functionalities like autonomous ransomware detection. It's ML anomaly detection with automatic restoration points, immutability, SnapLock and object lock. Always on, always portable policies,that move with your data. Rapid clean recovery. Look, others chase raw speed. We talk about speed and survivability together. Legacy stacks bolt on security.cannot be bolted on. Protective, intelligent data security and data protection is required by design on the platform. Let's talk about a few innovations in this area. One, NetApp ransomware resilience. It's a new service built into the platform. What does it do? From the NetApp console, you can easily protect Every workload monitors threats, including the ones raised by ARP. Ransomware resilience has two great features. One is data breach discovery. Detect data exfiltration in real time. Stop it before the damage occurs. You know that the attackers often copy the data first and then encrypt it. What do we do? We spot anomalous access, not just ransomware, alerts you early and lets you block the attack immediately. Now, one would also need a second line of defense, which is an isolated recovery environment. Clean, fast, malware-free recovery and restoration. Analyze and remove malware in isolation. Guided steps so that you can get your data back into production in near real time. Consider a financial services customer. We all know that they have sensitive data, customer data, transaction data,that is compliant across hybrid and multi-cloud. With NetApp ransomware resilience, you can protect it end to end irrespective of where the data is. ARP plus data breach discovery, detect anomalies, and trigger protection. SnapLock delivers tamper-proof snapshots. An isolated recovery environment enables clean, fast recovery when needed. Look, if your data is safe, your AI is safe. Resilience needs to travel with the data. It needs to be built into the platform. That's what we have with the NetApp data platform. Summarizing what we announced today is the first wave of a very fast-paced innovation roadmap. George showcased the vision we are delivering on that vision with these products. A unified platform for the AI built ONTAP speed and intelligence with AFX and AID built-in security and enterprise grade SLAs all on the platform. Your ability to run anywhere, on premises, all clouds as a service AI factories. It's integrated. It's yours. It is open ecosystem ready. It's a journey. Here is a journey that I would like to map for you. Think about unifying the data plane: files, blocks, objects, leverage AID and the strength of making every piece of data AI ready. Scale agentic workloads with AFX scale independently. Leverage the built-in cyber resilience capabilities, enabling all of you to drive, deliver outcomes, AI outcomes faster than ever, at lower cost. See all of our innovations in the festival grounds, attend our featured sessions. In closing, I want to say that with NetApp's intelligent data infrastructure, you,alone have the superpower to deliver exceptional value, not in the future, today. It's our opportunity to build the data supply chain for the agentic era as one team. You know, I want to thank George, our CEO, for the vision that brought us here. We reinvented unified storage. Today, we unify the data itself with a shared data model, metadata fabric that turns raw data into knowledge irrespective of where it lives. This is the engine of intelligent data infrastructure and the promise that we have for you as our customers. Now, to tell you more about how intelligent data infrastructure delivers real outcomes, unleashes potential for you and your organizations, let me welcome on stage our chief marketing officer, KB Boo. Thank you. It is so good to be here with all of you at Insight 2025. Under the neon lights of Las Vegas, and while it's incredibly hard for a CMO to follow a CEO and a CPO with amazing product launches, here I am, because you've just heard George lay out a spectacular vision for our future. You've heard Shaw ground that in spectacular product launches, and guess what? Now you get to hear from me about intelligent data infrastructure. Because building the product for us is only half of the story. The other half is making sure that we show up and we solve the right problems, and that's my job, but it's also all of NetApp's job to listen to you. To spot trends and patterns and to bring them back to the company to ensure that we're solving the right problems that are shaped by your voices. Our industry clearly doesn't need any more hype, and I know that's funny coming from a CMO, but it's true. What it really needs is real results,that don't often come from just technology alone. They come from people, all of you, from the ingenuity and drive and creativity sitting right here in this room, and from your teams that are back home who didn't get to come, who hopefully will come next year. This is impact at a human scale. Because at the end of the day, at NetApp we don't just believe that we move data, we actually believe that we create possibility. From mapping the stars to igniting fusion. To animating the stories that make us laugh and cry and dream, our technology has powered some of the most awe-inspiring events of human progress. And that's where intelligent data infrastructure comes in. That's where it shows up as the foundation that turns ideas into reality, turns transformation into possibility. Now when you walked into this room, I don't know if any of you noticed it, but there was this big door that opened. We believe thatdoor is an opening to the future of intelligent data infrastructure. Behind the experience that you're gonna hear from all of us here at Insight this week and behind what you heard from George and Sean, and what you're gonna hear in all of the sessions is about three things. It's about our legacy. Our platform and about our innovation. So let's talk about those three things, but let's start with what they mean for you and for the future. You know, legacy sometimes to some people means old or outdated. But to us here at NetApp, we believe that legacy means proven trust. And that's trust that's been built over 30 years of relentless innovation and data, trust that's earned by helping customers and partners just like all of you, modernize, deliver, and lead in every era of innovation, every era of change. And that trust, it's not passive, it's very clearly, very clearly active. And it's not something that we take lightly because we know it's earned. We know that trust is earned with you. It's earned through continuous modernization. It's earned through bold choices, and it's earned through outcomes that matter to you and your teams and your customers, and the proof of that trust, quite frankly, as you've already heard, is in our partnerships. From the earliest days of our cloud journey to the innovations that you and Microsoft are clearly delivering, Microsoft continues to trust NetApp to help our joint customers solve their most pressing challenges. Hi, I'm Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and AI at Microsoft. At Microsoft, we're proud to partner with NetApp to redefine what's possible in the cloud, especially in this new era of AI. Together, we're pushing the boundaries of innovation across cloud infrastructure. And nowhere is that more evident than in Azure NetApp Files. With recent investments in Azure NetApp Files, customers can now migrate mission-critical on tap workloads from on-prem to Azure, unlocking modernization, unifying data platforms, and accelerating innovation. Azure NetApp Files delivers unmatched scalability and reliability and is soon offering four times the performance gains compared to previous versions, making it a foundation for high-performance computing workloads like electronic design automation. Our own Azure hardware systems and infrastructure team uses NetApp Files at multi-petabyte scale to fast-track chip designs like our new Azure Maya and Azure Cobalt processors. And now, with Azure NetApp Files integrated into Azure Discovery, we're enabling Agenic AI to transform R&D, bringing intelligent data infrastructure to life. With the recent integration of the Object Res endpoint, customers can now tap into the full portfolio of Azure Data and AI services with their NetApp storage, whether in Azure NetApp Files, Cloud Volumes ONTAP, or on-prem. This unlocks intelligent data access at scale, bringing speed, simplicity, and real business impact. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey with us. The future of cloud in the eye is here, and it's built on strong partnerships like ours. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Microsoft. Thank you all too, to all of our hyperscalers, because we don't take that trust for granted and we don't take that trust for granted that we've earned with you. This is why legacy isn't just about where we've been. This is what gives you, our customers and our partners confidence in where we're going, and that's the perfect setup for a question. Why NetApp? But maybe not just why NetApp, but why NetApp for you? For decades, storage was about one thing. It was about keeping data safe and available. It was a box. It was a system. It was a destination. But very clearly, it's no longer just those things. It's not just passive. We know that data drives real-time decisions; it trains AI models, it detects threats and it fuels business outcomes across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. And we already have heard how with the advent of AI and with all of the data that you have, scale and complexity have exploded. We know you need automation, visibility, policy, governance and protection, AI readiness absolutely everywhere. That's intelligent data infrastructure. Intelligent data infrastructure isn't just about where the data lives, it's actually about how the data moves, it's how it's governed, it's how it's protected and how it accelerates outcomes. Because our platform unifies every data type. It uses the metadata fabric that you've already heard about to make that data intelligent. And we're able to activate that at enterprise scale, not just store it. That's unified storage to unified data. Because that enables organizations like yours. To manage any data for any application. Anywhere it's needed. Optimized, secured. And protected by intelligence. At a time when hype gets a little loud, NetApp is focused on delivering results. Measurable, meaningful and built on the foundation of trust we've just talked about. You know, behind every metric, like some of these that are gonna pop up behind me, these are moments of progress. These are challenges that are overcome. These are ideas that have been realized. Step forward. Every metric of success here is a moment to continue to build trust from us to you, to deliver innovation and drive outcomes that are not just for today. But hopefully, for every era of change. And that's,why NetApp. I hope that that's why NetApp for you. When we connect all these dots that we've been talking about with trust and with our platform, what we're, what we're having a conversation here is that these 30 years of trust in our proven technology. And intelligent data infrastructure, there's one thing that I hope you take away from that, and that's when,data becomes intelligent. Something bigger actually happens. It accelerates ideas. It amplifies people. And it sparks breakthroughs. The ultimate outcome for us is tapping into the genius, the ingenuity of your teams, the intelligence of your data, and unleashing potential at scale. The ultimate outcome is removing the friction between data and innovation. And turning complexity into clarity. And that's NetApp's commitment. To give you a foundation that you can trust, one that's more than just data infrastructure, one that's designed to lead you to the ultimate outcome. Finding a spark. To blaze a trail. Pushing the limit. To achieve the impossible. Igniting brilliance to break through boundaries. When you tap into the full power of your data, you command the future you create. That's what inspires us to make data infrastructure intelligent, so you can work smarter, move faster, and think bigger. We're not interested in hype, we're focused on helping you bring your vision to life. Because nothing should stand in between your data and extraordinary outcomes. Unleash genius. You know what, that's for a marketer that's more than just a campaign, and at NetApp we think that that's far more than a campaign for us. This is actually an invitation. It's an invitation to every single one of you. To take what's possible and to make it real, to turn intelligence into impact, and to do what once may have felt out of reach actually possible. Now we know that genius doesn't end at the end of your enterprise. It's actually just the beginning. For us, that's proof that intelligent data infrastructure isn't just a promise. It's already powering the future. It's powering your genius. For you, I hope that's confidence to bet big and know that your data foundation is absolutely going to hold. This is the NetApp story. Focusing on what we do best, going hopefully where you ask us to go, and partnering with you every step of the way. Because, in truth, the only way we unleash genius is by helping you unleash yours. It all starts with a dream, right? When I was a child, I would see every night the wonderful spectacle full of stars that made me I wonder how distant they were, the journey of the light from the stars to my eyes. The European Space Agency is an intergovernmental organization. It has 23 member states, and it is devoted to studying space. We have sent missions to planets. We have landed on a comet. We are creating 3D maps of the galaxy, but this is just the beginning. Our science missions produce a lot of data, more and more every year. For example, Gaia has observed 2 billion stars, and Euclid will observe 1.5 billion galaxies. NetApp is one of the most efficient, scalable, and flexible systems we have ever had. In fact, in these 20 years of experience with NetApp, we have never lost a single fight. NetApp takes cybersecurity seriously. When we rely on NetApp and its ransomware capabilities, we are confident that our cybersecurity posture is also improving through the years with the help of NetApp. When I speak about amounts of data, I'm speaking about tens of petabytes. Because of the importance of that data, we call this place the digital library of the universe. We really look to inspire the new generations so that they are the future astronauts, scientists, researchers, and engineers. We are already on our path to an intelligent data infrastructure, and the new missions are able to observe a lot more of the universe. For me, this is one of the major wonders in all this journey, which is just starting. Please welcome back George Curian. While I am honored and humbled to be part of that awesome responsibility, to help mankind. Document the entire galaxy. I'm so proud that we have earned the trust of such a leading organization to enable humankind to go where we have never gone before. And to be able to have a track record. To have never lost data for the customers who trust us with thousands and thousands of terabytes of the world's most important data. So proud, so humbled, so honored. I want to thank Gaby and Sham. We've had an awesome and momentous day. We talked about the opportunity that AI creates and that capturing it is contingent on your data. Second, we said that traditional methods of transforming raw data into AI-ready data are highly inefficient and were built for another era. And third, what you need for this era is a unified data platform. Built on a foundation of unified data storage with the intelligence of an active metadata fabric. That enables distributed data processing. So that you can transform your data into knowledge, the knowledge of your stakeholders that helps you capture the opportunities of this era of data-enabled intelligence. And we talked about how NetApp is delivering just that. With the NetApp data platform at the heart of the intelligent data infrastructure that we are enabling for you. Powered by the breakthrough AFX series. That creates a new class of data infrastructure system. Combining data transformation and processing with data storage and retrieval. The DI data engine. To make your data pipelines secure, simple, efficient, and resilient. No mistakes. No complexity. No security gaps. Just your data transformed the way that you want to use it. And in turn, we transform NetApp from being your data storage provider to your data platform provider. To help you transform your data into knowledge. Let me close by reminding ourselves of why we are all here. We stand in a long line of innovators and stewards of data.is the foundation of knowledge. The knowledge to understand where we've come from. To share our stories. Our traditions to be able to understand ourselves and to understand each other. And by doing so, to build a better world. To make ourselves better, to make our teams better, to make our organizations better, to make our communities better and to make the world better. Like you and me, so many humans have pursued that knowledge through data for more than 35,000 years, and here we stand today with more powerful tools and more amounts of data than we've ever had. The opportunity that we have today is to accomplish so much more at a time when our world needs it more than ever. So let us commit together to go forth from here with a shared purpose, to use our power, our creativity, and the powerful tools that we have given you. To unleash our collective genius. to make our organizations, our communities, and our world so much better. Together. Thank you. Have an awesome insight. God bless.
See how NetApp helps you modernize and unify your data infrastructure, streamline operations, and unlock new levels of innovation across AI, security, data services, and cloud. We're not just preparing for the future — we're building it.