NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the leading intelligent data infrastructure company, has announced today the introduction of new capabilities designed for strategic workloads in the cloud, including GenAI and VMware environments. These enhancements in NetApp’s data and storage services reduce resources and risks for customers managing these strategic workloads in increasingly complex hybrid and multicloud environments.
"Strategic workloads, including GenAI and virtualized environments, are driving business innovation and have increasingly complex infrastructure requirements that demand a lot of resources, pushing IT teams to the limit," said Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Storage at NetApp. "NetApp is helping customers take back control of their data with intelligent data infrastructure that leverages unified data storage, integrated data services, and automated cloud operations. Even when facing specific and nuanced technological requirements for modern workloads, NetApp provides them with the tools needed to optimize and simplify their data operations in hybrid and multicloud environments."
New NetApp Capabilities
To advance intelligent data infrastructure deployments that best support strategic workloads like GenAI and VMware environments, NetApp introduces new capabilities, including:
NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory for AWS: This intelligent data infrastructure service uses industry-defined best practices to automate planning, provisioning, and management of resources and services in the cloud for key workloads, including GenAI, VMware environments in the cloud, and enterprise databases. BlueXP Workload Factory enables customers to optimize deployment time, cost, performance, and resource protection for strategic workloads and their associated data. Additionally, it simplifies workload migrations to the cloud by allowing users to profile infrastructure requirements and compare different resource options based on cost and performance needs.
NetApp GenAI Toolkit – Microsoft Azure NetApp Files Version: Customers can now include private enterprise data stored in Azure NetApp Files in their securely and programmatically integrated workflows for generation augmented by retrieval (RAG). This integration enhances the ability to generate unique, high-quality, and highly relevant results in GenAI projects by combining proprietary data with pre-trained models.
Amazon Bedrock Reference Architecture with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP: AWS and NetApp have released a joint reference architecture that provides guidance for implementing RAG-enabled workflows that incorporate proprietary data stored in Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP in their GenAI data pipelines. This architecture allows developers to use APIs to connect with Amazon FSx for ONTAP data stores, enabling secure use of proprietary data with a selection of high-performance pre-trained models.
Enhancements in Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP: AWS has announced the next generation of the Amazon FSx for ONTAP cloud storage service with enhanced capabilities to increase scalability and flexibility, providing up to 6 GB per second of performance for a highly available (HA) pair from 512 TiB of storage. Next-generation file systems offer virtualized workloads more room to grow with a 300% increase in network burst performance and a 150% increase in disk burst performance.
- NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery Support for VMFS: The BlueXP disaster recovery service, which provides guided workflows to design and execute automated disaster recovery plans for VMware workloads in on-premises and cloud environments, has been expanded to support VMFS data stores for local-to-local disaster recovery.
NetApp’s Ongoing Innovations
These updates build upon NetApp’s existing offerings that support storage and data operations for customers needing to deploy and manage strategic workloads like GenAI and VMware environments. NetApp has also recently announced that its unique data classification capability BlueXP, which automatically classifies and categorizes data to enhance governance and secure ingestion in GenAI and RAG data pipelines, is now available at no additional cost to all NetApp customers.
With these new capabilities, NetApp continues to lead the way in intelligent data infrastructure, providing customers with the tools needed to efficiently manage their data operations in complex multicloud environments. These innovations not only facilitate the deployment of advanced workloads but also ensure that businesses can quickly adapt to changing market demands and new technological realities.