NetApp Unveils AI Data Engine and Disaggregated Storage to Revolutionize Enterprise AI Infrastructure

NetApp's new AI Data Engine extends its intelligent storage infrastructure to AI workloads - SiliconANGLE

NetApp's new AI Data Engine extends its intelligent storage infrastructure to AI workloads Data storage pioneer NetApp Inc. is building on its vision of an "intelligent data infrastructure" platform that's fit for the artificial intelligence era with the launch of its new AI Data Engine. Announced at the company's annual user conference NetApp Insight 2025, it's a comprehensive service that aims to make AI data pipelines simpler, easier to set up, more affordable and secure. The NetApp AI Data Engine is designed to be used with a new disaggregated, all-flash storage system that's dedicated to AI workloads. It's called NetApp AFX, and the company wants it to become the foundation for "AI factories," or essentially, the massive clusters of specialized computing infrastructure that powers AI models. The company is also taking major steps towards securing those AI pipelines with new data breach detection and isolated recovery environments that can identify attempted breaches and prevent intrusions such as malware. NetApp said the new AI Data Engine is a secure and unified extension of the NetApp ONTAP operating system, which is designed for managing data storage across multiple environments, including the cloud, virtualized and on-premises settings. It's based on Nvidia Corp.'s AI Data Platform reference design to help businesses simplify and secure their AI data pipelines and manage them through a single, unified control plane. With the AI Data Engine, NetApp is trying to build the foundation of all AI data pipelines, taking care of both data ingestion and preparation, so it can serve any generative AI application or model, while providing a complete overview of customer's entire data estates. It supports extensive search and data curation capabilities and features automatic data change detection and data synchronization to eliminate redundant copies and ensure that the information sent through pipelines is always up to date. Because it's based on Nvidia's AI Platform reference design, it supports Nvidia-accelerated computing and specialized software such as NIM microservices, allowing it to search and retrieve vectorized information. Other capabilities include "advanced compression, fast semantic discovery and secure, policy-driven workflows," the company said. It's designed to run on top of the new AFX appliance, and will also support Nvidia's RTX Pro servers featuring Blackwell Server Edition graphics processing units. NetApp Chief Product Officer Syam Nair said customers will be able to use the AI Data Engine to connect their entire data estates across multicloud environments and build a unified data foundation for AI. "Enterprises can then dramatically accelerate their AI data pipelines by collapsing multiple data preparation and management steps into the integrated NetApp AI Data Engine," he added. The announcement is notable for being one of the first concrete steps taken by the company to try and fulfill its vision for AI, which is focused on helping organizations to become more data intelligent. In July, NetApp Chief Executive George Kurian (pictured) appeared on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's mobile livestreaming talk show, where he talked about how the company is trying to leverage its ability to unify siloed data across clouds and on-premises environments while preserving access controls, privacy rules and compliance mandates in order to support sensitive AI workloads: Steve McDowell of NAND Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that the AI Data Engine is based on an architecture that leverages NetApp's core storage capabilities and fits them into a disaggregated solution that can support a broad range of AI and analytics workloads. "NetApp has talked about its NetApp Data Platform vision for AI for a long time, and today's announcements are really the first instantiation of that vision," he said. The NetApp AFX appliance was built specifically for AI data workloads, decoupling performance and capacity through a disaggregated ONTAP. It's certified to work with the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD supercomputing system for AI, offering all of NetApp's robust data management and built-in cyber resilience capabilities, secure multi-tenancy, independent scaling of capacity and performance and compatibility with cloud and on-premises environments, the company said. In addition, customers can also attach optional DX50 data control nodes to power a global metadata engine for a real-time catalog of enterprise data and leverage Nvidia accelerated computing. "The DX50 gives NetApp the flexibility to deploy new software features that align with enterprise AI needs," McDowell said. The analyst believes NetApp AFX can be a major differentiator for the company because it eliminates the headaches associated with trying to choose the best hardware for AI data. He explained that it's able to handle some of the most complex data processing tasks, including metadata management and, of course, running the AI Data Engine. "AFX is a compelling piece of engineering that makes it relatively easy to build a disaggregated data pipeline to meet most needs," he said. "Where its competitors deliver a software-only solution that forces customers to figure out the hardware piece, NetApp provides packaged hardware components that just need to be connected together." To complement its new AI data foundation, NetApp announced a host of new cyber defense capabilities, with the most significant being its rebranded NetApp Ransomware Resilience service, which gains the ability to prevent data from being stolen. Formerly known as the Ransomware Protection Service, NetApp Ransomware Resilience helps customers to identify and recover from ransomware attacks faster and more easily, while minimizing the damage they cause. The best thing about it is that it's fully automated, supports both file and block storage, and can be controlled via a single control plane, without requiring deep security expertise or training, the company said. Besides detecting ransomware, the service now comes with an AI-powered data breach detection capability that's able to identify anomalous user and file system behavior that might indicate someone is trying to steal a company's data. When it spots suspicious activity, it'll issue an immediate alert to the customer through their integrated security information and event management tools, providing them with the necessary forensic data to take swift and decisive action. In this way, it can block the unauthorized movement of sensitive data almost as soon as it happens, preventing serious damage. McDowell said NetApp's ransomware detection capabilities were already notable, because it's one of the only companies that tries to do this directly in the storage layer. "Nearly every other competitor, with IBM being the lone exception, detects malware in snapshots, not real time," he said. The analyst explained that NetApp is now building on top of this ability in order to prevent data being stolen. It's a significant new capability that will go a long way towards reassuring enterprises, he believes, because after ransomware, stolen data is one of the biggest threats they face. "NetApp's exfiltration detection is the first time we've seen this sort of ability integrated into a storage platform," McDowell noted. "It's a powerful feature that extends NetApp's competitive moat in this area. It's the only storage provider doing this." Another new feature in the Ransomware Protection Service is isolated recovery environments, which make it possible to cordon off individual workloads that may have come under ransomware attack. In these environments, NetApp's AI scanning tools can then identify any maliciously impacted data and figure out the point at which it was modified. It'll then guide customers step-by-step on what they need to do to restore that data safely and prevent reinfection.

NetApp Introduces Disaggregated Storage, New Software In Major Enterprise AI Push

'We're offering several new innovations to help provide an enterprise-grade data platform for AI,' says Jeff Baxter, NetApp's vice president of product marketing. Data platform and storage technology developer NetApp Tuesday expanded its reach into helping customers derive value from their AI data infrastructure with the introduction of a new disaggregated storage system along with a new comprehensive AI data service. The company also added data breach detection to its cyber resilience capabilities. The new hardware and software offerings were introduced at the NetApp Insight 2025 conference being held this week in Las Vegas. [Related: NetApp CEO Says Don't Call NetApp A Storage Company] NetApp is really advancing the state of the art in enterprise AI, said Jeff Baxter, vice president of product marketing for the San Jose, Calif.-based company. "We're offering several new innovations to help provide an enterprise-grade data platform for AI," Baxter told CRN. "We're specifically focused on the challenge of providing AI-ready data so as customers build out their enterprise AI and move toward agentic AI, they have an enterprise-grade data platform that always has AI-ready data for them to greatly increase the chances for success of their enterprise IT initiatives." Key to that is NetApp's new AFX 1K, its first disaggregated storage system, along with the new NetApp AI Data Engine software that runs on the AFX, Baxter said. By "disaggregated storage," NetApp means separating the storage controllers from the storage capacity, Baxter said. "With NetApp's AFF and other modern storage systems, you can scale out, but each individual controller has its own storage capacity," he said. "In a disaggregated storage architecture like NetApp AFX, all the storage controllers are attached to a high-speed, low-latency network, resulting in one giant single pool of storage with the ability for every storage controller to connect to every storage enclosure." This is critical for AI, Baxter said. "We see AI workloads with relatively small datasets but a huge amount of throughput for model training and other things," he said. "And we see RAG inferencing where you may need a lot more data but not quite as much performance. This architecture allows you to fully disaggregate, fully expand and fully grow." "Disaggregated storage" is an industry term, not just a NetApp term, Baxter said. "We believe we built the most modern and advanced disaggregated storage architecture, primarily because we're able to do it all with Ontap and all its advanced data capabilities, resiliency and enterprise-grade features that NetApp has built over the last decade," he said. NetApp AFX pairs well with NetApp's Keystone Storage-as-a-Service technology, Baxter said. "You're paying for a certain service level, and we will automatically expand or even contract your AFX cluster to meet the performance and capacity requirements for your given SLA," he said. "We'll automatically add more performance or capacity as needed and manage that entire AI data platform for you." NetApp's new AI Data Engine comprehensive data service has four key pillars, Baxter said: Also new with NetApp AFX are the company's first storage controllers that can be configured with Nvidia GPUs to accelerate a wide range of AI applications, Baxter said. The new NetApp AI Data Engine software, an optional licensed application for the NetApp AFX, runs on the GPUs in NetApp's DX-50 Nvidia L40 GPU-based storage controllers attached directly to the cluster, Baxter said. "This means that it can immediately see all of your data and perform AI operations on it all within that storage cluster, which dramatically cuts down on data movement and improves efficiency," he said. [You can] pair this with your choice of AI model and AI hardware. You could build that on Nvidia DGX, as part of FlexPod with Cisco, or with any server vendor working with Nvidia GPUs. Just connect to the GPUs within the storage cluster to provide AI-ready data at speed and scale." NetApp is not in the accelerated compute business, Baxter said. "Our goal is, over time, to allow channel partners to work with the vast swath of excellent compute partners out there to utilize the constantly growing number of the latest Nvidia GPUs and connect them directly into the AFX cluster to accelerate compute directly to the data," he said. NetApp also made it easier for businesses to connect to the Azure public cloud with a couple of new services, Baxter said. The first is a new object REST API that lets businesses access their Azure NetApp Files data, he said. This lets NFS and SMB datasets connect directly to Microsoft Fabric, Azure OpenAI, Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse, Azure AI Search, Azure Machine Learning and so on without the need to move or copy file data into a separate object store to analyze data, train AI models, perform intelligent searches and build modern applications on existing Azure NetApp Files datasets. The second is an enhanced unified global namespace in Microsoft Azure that lets businesses unify their global data estate across cloud and on-premises into Microsoft Azure with Azure NetApp Files' new FlexCache capabilities so data stored in NetApp Ontap-based storage on-premises or across multiple clouds is visible and writeable in Azure NetApp Files environments, Baxter said. NetApp also updated its NetApp Shift Toolkit, a free piece of software for NetApp Ontap customers that uses the company's cloning technologies to move workloads from one hypervisor to another without having to copy the data, Baxter said. The Shift Toolkit previously could quickly turn a VMware VMDK virtual machine into a Microsoft Hyper-V VHD virtual machine, he said. "Now we'll do that with KVM as well to support Red Hat OpenShift, Oracle Linux Virtual Manager, Proxmox and other KVM variants so that customers will have even more freedom of choice to freely switch between hypervisors without having to do whole massive data migrations," he said On the cyber resilience front, NetApp is expanding the NetApp Ransomware Resilience autonomous ransomware protection suite, formerly known as Blue XP, Baxter said. This includes new data breach detection that will now be available in addition to ransomware detection, he said. Ransomware detection is fundamentally about looking for anomalous data writes, while data breach detection is fundamentally looking for anomalous reads, such as when a user who normally accesses a few files a day in a couple of directories all of a sudden accesses 100 files at a time in directories they've never touched before or is suddenly copying Gbytes per second of traffic, Baxter said "Now if we see any of those, we will alert the customer and their choice of SIEM [security information and event management] software that we see this going on, and we'll give them a very easy option directly within the interface to block that end user or block that end system at least temporarily from reads while they figure out what's going on," he said. Flexibility in storage is important for customers, said Ned Engelke, CTO of Evotek, a San Diego-based solution provider and NetApp channel partner. "I love the idea of having more control over performance and more control over performance relative to density," Engelke told CRN. "For instance, customers want the lowest possible power consumption for an archive. So I want to get the least amount of compute and the most amount of slower drives. Maybe we can start to build those kinds of architectures." Engelke said Evotek's customers are all over the board in terms of how they are using AI. "We have some customers that are AI hosting facilities, and they are doing a lot because that's all they do," he said. "We have some customers testing to evaluate the viability of artificial intelligence in hyperscaler environments. Some are repatriating those workloads. We don't have any customers yet coming to us and saying, 'We're building out a specific big environment for AI, but we expect one exception to be defense contractors.' Their main focus is around getting their environment to be flexible and adapt to workloads on demand. We've seen that with people who are developing AI and testing and then going to deployment. But in general, we're seeing baby steps but not huge adoptions." Meanwhile, adding data breach detection to the NetApp Ransomware Resilience suite is an important step forward for the company, he said. "A customer might normally have 10 file accesses per hour from this group, but then it increases 10,000, and they see, 'We might have a problem here,'" he said. "So from my perspective, anything we can get to alert a customer when something goes wrong is additive. When we look at companies like Rubrik or Cohesity, they've had a similar detection feature for years. So I'm glad to see that type of visibility, that type of approach, incorporated into a primary storage platform like NetApp's."