NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, has announced the launch of new capabilities for strategic cloud workloads, such as GenAI and VMware. These enhancements to NetApp’s storage and data management services are designed to reduce the resources and risks associated, allowing customers to handle these workloads in increasingly complex multicloud hybrid environments.
“Strategic workloads, including GenAI and virtualized environments, are driving business innovation and have increasingly complex infrastructure requirements with resource-intensive use cases that are pushing IT teams to the limit,” says Jaime Balañá, NetApp’s Technical Director for Iberoamerica. “NetApp is helping customers regain 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 they need to optimize and simplify their data operations in their environments through hybrid multicloud.”
To advance intelligent data infrastructure deployments that better support strategic workloads such as GenAI and VMware environments, NetApp announces new functionalities, including:
– NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory for AWS: This intelligent data infrastructure service automates planning, provisioning, and management of cloud resources and services for key workloads, such as GenAI, VMware cloud environments, and enterprise databases. NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory optimizes deployment time, cost, performance, and protection of resources for strategic workloads and their associated data. It also simplifies cloud migrations, allowing users to profile the infrastructure requirements of their workloads and compare different resource options based on cost and performance needs. The service then provisions the selected resources, transfers data from existing workloads to new cloud deployments, and continuously optimizes the entire environment to ensure the required cost and performance goals.
– GenAI Toolkit by NetApp – Azure NetApp Files version: Customers can now include private enterprise data stored in Azure NetApp Files in their augmented recovery generation (RAG) workflows in a secure and programmatic way. The result is enhanced ability to generate unique, high-quality, and ultra-relevant results from GenAI projects by combining their private data with pre-trained foundational models (FMs). The integration of GenAI Toolkit with Azure NetApp Files with OpenAI represents a powerful synergy that enables customers to leverage advanced language generation capabilities.
– Amazon Bedrock Reference Architecture with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP: Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and NetApp have launched a joint reference architecture that provides guidance to customers on implementing RAG-enabled workflows that bring proprietary data stored in Amazon FSx for ONTAP to their GenAI data pipelines. Amazon FSx facilitates and streamlines the deployment, execution, and scaling of high-performance, feature-rich file systems in the cloud. The reference architecture allows developers to use Amazon Bedrock’s APIs to connect to Amazon FSx data stores for ONTAP, enabling secure use of proprietary data with a selection of high-performance FMs that can be customized to unlock new insights and capabilities.
– Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP enhancements: AWS has just announced the next generation of the Amazon FSx cloud storage service for ONTAP with improved capabilities to drive scalability and flexibility. The new 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. For large-scale, high-performance workloads like GenAI, the second generation of Amazon FSx for ONTAP systems supports dynamic scalability by adding HA pairs as needed, up to 24 nodes. This provides up to 72 GB per second of performance from 1 PiB of SSD storage, delivering greater flexibility and performance for these evolving business needs.
– 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, both on-premises and in the cloud, has been enhanced to include support for VMFS datastores in disaster recovery from on-premises to on-premises environments.
These updates build on NetApp’s existing offerings that support storage and data operations for customers needing to deploy and manage strategic, high-powered workloads like GenAI and VMware environments. For example, NetApp recently announced that its unique data classification service, BlueXP Classification, which automatically classifies and categorizes data to enhance governance and secure data ingestion in GenAI and RAG data pipelines, has become a core service in controlling these flows and is now available for free to all NetApp customers.
“When it comes to GenAI, organizations’ key goal is to adapt their data strategies to ensure they can balance data security, cost efficiency, and innovation as they leverage pre-built LLMs to surface relevant and useful information from their proprietary data relevant to the business,” says Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Director, Cloud Data Management at IDC. “NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure capabilities can help customers overcome data challenges and provide specific guidance to automate workflows that can securely feed private data directly into public cloud provider LLMs. Additionally, NetApp’s BlueXP Classification has the potential to mitigate risks in AI data operations by allowing users to discover and categorize data so that the right data feeds into the right model without exposing confidential, personal, or restricted information.”
“Organizations are now facing different economic realities regarding virtualized environments, and we all need to move quickly to address recent industry changes,” says Derek Elbert, Solutions Architect at WWT. “Optimizing the cost-performance equation of VMware workloads has become a primary initiative for us, with the goal of continuing to provide scalability and performance while reducing unnecessary system and software resources. NetApp offerings, such as the BlueXP disaster recovery service and Cloud Insights optimization metrics, help us better ensure proper resource allocation levels and protection schemes for virtual environments, allowing us to focus on putting our infrastructure to work without breaking FinOps metrics.”