The autonomous estate speaks, now secure on your terms

For twenty years, storage estates have been silent partners. Vast, complex, and mute; they held the data and ran the workloads, but they never told you what they needed. You had to go find out, cluster by cluster, dashboard by dashboard, ticket by ticket. That's changing. The estate speaks now, and for the first time, what it has to say runs entirely on your terms, not a vendor's.

Storage fleets that once meant a handful of clusters now mean 20, 50, 100, or 500-plus systems spread across data centers and every major hyperscaler. The tools multiply faster than the teams that run them: five or more disconnected toolsets, each showing a slice of the estate, none showing the whole picture. Provisioning still moves through tickets. Remediation still starts with a call at 2 a.m., and the admin closest to the actual risk, the one who knows a workload needs 500GB of regulated, encrypted, geo-replicated capacity, spends the morning figuring out which cluster can honor that promise, not deciding whether it should.

Enterprise IT doesn't have a tooling problem anymore

Enterprise IT now has a translation problem: turning what the business needs into what the infrastructure does, correctly, every time, at a scale no team can track by hand. NetApp^® Console^™, and its new AI-ChatOps interface exists to close that gap, and it does it without asking IT to trade governance for speed.

When the estate finds its voice

Ask a question in plain language. Get a governed action, not another dashboard to interpret. That's the shift NetApp Console and its conversational interface make possible. Instead of hunting through per-cluster consoles to check capacity, diagnose a performance issue, or kick off a provisioning workflow, administrators simply describe what they need. Console with its integrated agentic AI translates that declared intent into the right storage action and does it inside the same permissions and audit trail the team already enforces. A junior admin can now ask the kind of question that used to require a senior architect's judgment call and get an answer that's both correct and compliant.

This is what it means for the estate to speak: not a chatbot bolted onto a legacy console, but a genuine interface layer for autonomous operations, replacing “which button do I press” with “what outcome do I need.”

A voice that only answers to you

Here's the part every enterprise security team asks about first, and the part that makes this announcement differentiated: whose model is doing the listening?

NetApp Console answers through an open LLM gateway. Customers bring their own large language model, keeping models and data under their own governance rather than a vendor's. Every AI-assisted action, regardless of which LLM powers the conversation, still executes only within the storage classes, policies, and governance boundaries the organization has already defined. The estate speaks, but it speaks through your infrastructure, on your model, inside your walls.

That's the core of what we're announcing: the NetApp Console AI-ChatOps interface replaces manual workflows with secure, conversational, outcome-based automation. It reduces the burden on enterprise IT administrators who manage fragmented tools across massive hybrid fleets, without sacrificing governance or control. Operating through that open LLM gateway, customers realize secure AI operations, leveraging their own LLM while ensuring every action remains within defined storage classes, policies, and governance guardrails, across ONTAP^®, StorageGRID^®, E/EF-Series storage systems, with data protection through Backup and Recovery, wherever data lives. NetApp Console lets you choose your model that your assistant uses.

Provisioning by policy, not guesswork

Underneath every conversation is a governance model built for scale: the storage class. Teams define a storage class (the protection level, retention, replication, and performance a workload requires), and storage policy once, then every placement decision is checked against it automatically. Declare that a dataset is regulated and performance-sensitive, and Console evaluates the fleet, ranks the clusters that qualify, and provisions accordingly. The administrator never chose a cluster. They declared the intent, and the estate held it true.

That's the practical meaning of intent-based provisioning and placement: consistent, compliant outcomes whether you're managing ten clusters or five hundred, without a human re-deriving the right answer every single time.

Autonomous, but never unaccountable

Autonomy only earns trust when it's explainable. NetApp Console and its closed-loop remediation acts inside guardrails the team defines (spanning capacity, quality of service, and ransomware response) while keeping a human in the loop for approval and oversight. Predictive analytics flag capacity pressure before it becomes an outage; AI-powered reporting turns a health alert into a resolved issue instead of an open ticket. The guardrails, not a black-box model, decide how far autonomy can go, which means every action stays authenticated, auditable, and reversible on your terms rather than a model's.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. An assistant that quietly acts on your infrastructure is a liability. An assistant whose every action is checked against policy before it executes, and logged after, is infrastructure you can defend in front of a change board.

The estate that holds itself accountable

Complete control has never meant doing everything by hand. It means an environment where unified manageability, agentic AI operations, and intent-based automation work together, so an outcome declared once holds true across the entire fleet, provably, not just plausibly, and always on the terms your organization sets, not a vendor's.

That's the real promise of NetApp Console: the estate finally has a voice, it speaks in plain language, and it never once leaves your walls to do it. Declare your outcome. Keep your control. Let the estate speak, now secure on your terms.

NetApp Console is the autonomous control plane, agentic operations, unified management and observability of the NetApp Platform ensuring complete control, across your vocal estate.

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