NetApp & NVIDIA partner to enhance AI data solutions

NetApp has announced advancements in its agentic AI solutions by integrating the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, enhancing data-driven capabilities for businesses.

The collaboration between NetApp and NVIDIA aims to improve how businesses utilise their data, particularly by speeding up AI reasoning inference. This development comes as businesses seek to transform substantial data assets into competitive advantages. By embracing an Intelligent Data Infrastructure framework, companies can streamline operations through integrated metadata cataloging, automation, and hybrid cloud capabilities, thus eradicating data silos and offering actionable insights throughout the AI pipeline.

The integration of NetApp's ONTAP with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform is designed to help businesses unlock the complete value of their data. The platform, based on NVIDIA's AI workflow optimisation expertise, offers a customisable reference design that combines NVIDIA's advanced computing, networking, and AI software with enterprise storage. This integration promises to convert data into actionable intelligence for users.

With the help of the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, NetApp customers can channel their data to drive AI reasoning workloads using advanced NVIDIA software. This includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, such as the NVIDIA AI-Q Blueprints and NVIDIA NIM microservices, to support models like NVIDIA Llama Nemotron Reason. Additionally, NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, networking, and the NVIDIA Dynamo open-source inference library will enable data insights in almost real-time.

Krish Vitaldevara, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Platform at NetApp, stated, "Traditional computing architectures and data management techniques are not up to the task of helping businesses thrive in the AI era. NVIDIA and NetApp are collaborating to give customers the tools they need to strategically unlock their data to drive the next wave of AI applications. By combining the NVIDIA AI Data Platform with the rich and mature data and AI management capabilities and services of NetApp ONTAP, enterprises can more easily bring AI to their data while maintaining security and compliance to achieve their goals of becoming data-driven businesses."

NetApp has outlined several capabilities in support of the NVIDIA AI Data Platform. These include a Global Metadata Namespace, enabling customers to securely discover, manage, and analyse data across hybrid multicloud systems to effectuate feature extraction and data classification for AI applications.

The Integrated AI Data Pipeline aims to enable automatic preparation of unstructured data for AI use. Through tracking incremental changes, leveraging efficient NetApp SnapMirror replication, data classification, and creating compressed vector embeddings, businesses can perform semantic searches for RAG inferencing.

Moreover, the Disaggregated Storage Architecture enables performance optimisation by balancing network and flash speeds with infrastructure costs. This is crucial for achieving high performance with minimal space and power needs for compute-intensive AI workloads.

This announcement builds on the long-standing collaboration between NetApp and NVIDIA, which includes an advanced generative AI data vision and end-to-end integrated solutions, combining NVIDIA's AI software and accelerated computing with NetApp's data infrastructure to advance enterprise RAG and agentic AI applications.

Kari Briski, Vice President of Generative AI Software for Enterprise at NVIDIA, noted, "Enterprise data is a rich source of information for AI reasoning, but the vast majority of enterprise data is unstructured, making it difficult to extract insights and meaning. Bringing together NetApp and the NVIDIA AI Data Platform creates a data pipeline that's always on, allowing business data to be readily available to AI agents so they can rapidly access information to make informed decisions."