Unified data storage for the AI era

Cloud, ransomware, and AI: the three disruptive forces prompting organizations across industries to rethink IT requirements and focus on modernization goals. If that describes your business, we have exciting announcements today: new intelligent data infrastructure that helps you simplify hybrid cloud data management, keep your data secure, and build a future-proof ecosystem.

The IT world has changed drastically in the last few years; it’s now defined by hybrid cloud and distributed apps and data. As enterprises seek solutions to slash hybrid complexity while speeding up modern workloads, NetApp delivers with unified data storage. NetApp unified data storage enables you to run any data type, and any app workload, seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments through a single OS —NetApp^® ONTAP^® software. And you can manage everything with the unified, AIOps-driven NetApp BlueXP™ control plane. Today, we’re pushing our innovation further with a major advance in unified data storage: new NetApp AFF A-Series systems that enable you to build and accelerate your AI data pipeline alongside everything you’re running today.

Powerful, intelligent, and secure, the new NetApp AFF A70, A90, and A1K systems deliver the advanced data management, industry-leading ransomware protection, and seamless cloud integration that enable the modern enterprise. With up to 40 million IOPS, 1TBps throughput, and massive scalability, these new AFF A-Series systems easily power the mission-critical workloads that drive your business today—as well as the AI and generative AI (GenAI) workloads that will unlock innovation and productivity for your organization tomorrow. So, you can optimize your VMware environment and accelerate your SAP and Oracle apps even as you protect all your data and seize your AI advantage.

AFF A-Series systems

Businesses know that ransomware, an ever-present threat, is bound to affect them eventually. Storage is your last line of ransomware defense—the point at which it’s incumbent on your organization to deploy the most secure storage. Like every other NetApp product running ONTAP, the new NetApp AFF A-Series systems deliver extensive, multilayered cyber-resilience capabilities to help you protect, detect in real time, and rapidly recover from ransomware attacks.

• Protect. Leverage robust mechanisms to protect data, including automatic malicious file type blocking, multifactor authentication, immutable tamperproof NetApp Snapshot™ copies, and end-to-end encryption.
• Detect. Pre-empt cyber threats via autonomous ransomware detection that’s built into ONTAP and enhanced by embedded machine-learning models. Together, these capabilities help you achieve better than 99% accuracy in detecting ransomware attacks in real time—an industry first.
• Recover. Rapidly recover from any attack by using immutable, tamperproof Snapshot copies. Combined with our Ransomware Recovery Guarantee, you can rest easy knowing that you’ll be able to recover your valuable data.

Today, we’re extending our ransomware defenses by announcing NetApp cyber vault—a powerful data protection solution that combines a layered approach to cyber resilience with logical air-gapping and, if you prefer, physical air-gapping. ONTAP hardening methodologies help you implement the highest levels of security for your most sensitive data. Using the Snapshot technology in ONTAP, you can create immutable and indelible backups that can withstand even the most sophisticated attacks. And, when combined with Snapshot technology, NetApp SnapLock® software enables you to create logically air-gapped cyber vaults—secure, isolated storage repositories that house your organization's most valuable data.

NetApp cyber vault solution

Put all these capabilities together, and you can see why no other storage vendor can match NetApp’s comprehensive, automated protection and recovery. That’s why we can confidently say we deliver the most secure storage on the planet.

AI and GenAI initiatives are top priorities across industries. Nearly every organization seeks to harness these technologies for efficiency, innovation, and competitive edge.

Often, a first step in the AI journey is modernizing existing data lakes and Hadoop environments to speed data preparation in AI workflows. To help with that, we’re announcing a refresh and expansion of our entire StorageGRID^® appliance portfolio with support for capacity flash appliances. These systems simplify and speed up AI adoption and data lake modernization, dramatically improving time to insight. StorageGRID enables secondary applications, too: Its affordable and high-performing object storage lowers solution costs through seamless data tiering. In both cases, StorageGRID makes deploying object storage workloads at scale easy and fast.

As inferencing, fine tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) become ever more important, customers continue to look for validated, ready-to-go infrastructure solutions, and today we’re announcing NetApp AIPod™ with Lenovo for NVIDIA OVX. This new AIPod architecture includes Lenovo high-performance computing servers with NVIDIA L40S GPUs, networking, and software—all validated with the NVIDIA OVX architecture for GenAI. AIPod with Lenovo is ideal for RAG and inferencing use cases. It provides an ideal blend of performance, cost, and density bundled into a validated, turnkey solution. Easy to deploy and scale, AIPod with Lenovo will accelerate AI deployment across the enterprise

High-performance NetApp intelligent data infrastructure is ideally suited to AI workloads, which you can add to your existing ecosystem as needed and without creating new silos or complexity. Equally important for enterprise AI, NetApp technology provides the simplicity, security, and governance required to mitigate risk while you confidently deploy safe, responsible AI. From the right storage, like AFF A-Series systems and StorageGRID, to integrations with NVIDIA and the MLOps ecosystem, to a converged infrastructure for AI and so much more, NetApp has the solutions to turbocharge your entire enterprise AI data pipeline. This is what makes NetApp the data foundation for enterprise AI.

At NetApp, we remain focused on delivering intelligent data infrastructure that enables your business not only to master your cloud and cybersecurity challenges, but to simplify at scale with a flexible, unified, AI-ready ecosystem that powers you today and future-proofs you for tomorrow.

To learn more about how you can get unified data storage equipped for the AI era, contact your sales representative, and check out our Unified Data Solutions site.