The News: NetApp expands Intelligent Data Infrastructure capabilities to power strategic cloud workloads, including gen AI, databases, and VMware. Read more here.
NetApp Intelligent Data Infrastructure and Latest Releases for the Cloud and AI
Analyst Take: This announcement highlights NetApp’s continued investments in the changing technologies needed for Cloud, AI, Generative AI, and the next generation of applications. It encompasses enhancements to their “Intelligent Data Infrastructure” that are designed to automate the management and operations of cloud resources and services particularly for AI. NetApp envisions streamlining processes needed to deploy and manage workloads for AWS with Azure and Google by the end of the year.
BlueXP is a data control plane for NetApp data infrastructure. This new extension, BlueXP Workload Factory, moves to the cloud and enables best practice deployments and operations for common workloads. Specifically designed for the cloud personas, they are able to deploy databases (SQL, Oracle, SAP), GenAI apps (for instance, create a data store and connect to BedRock with this specific CPU instance), or deploy for the VMware cloud. By specifying the requirements, BlueXP Workload Factory will provide the recommendations for deployment, cost, etc. and then spin up the services. This takes out the guessing of what is the best approach, whether this is correctly configured for the required IOPs, etc. I will note here that this has been in Beta for about 6 months, and is based on years of work with NetApp and AWS. Thus, it should be a solid deployment.
The second part of the announcement was to highlight their HyperScaler engagements. Jointly, AWS and NetApp are rolling out a reference architecture for AW Bedrock and FSx for ONTAP. With Azure, they are rolling out their GenAI toolkit, previously announced for Google and Vertex. The toolkit via a Terraform creates a Linux VM and launches a GenAI framework, all designed to streamline and ease the efforts for deployments, errors, etc. This opens up access to more LLMs and highlights the strength of NetApp’s decade of investments to become a first-party offering on all the HyperScalers.
NetApp used this announcement to emphasize their capabilities for GenAI RAG (Relevance Acceleration Generation, in which organizations further train their models with proprietary data). FlexClone and their snapshot technology are highly efficient and non-impactful on production. This makes copies for vector databases or indexes highly simplified and speed A/B testing. Add to this their unified data storage – meaning on ONTAP, seamlessly on premises and cloud – data can be accessed and trained where it makes the most sense. Also previously announced in May, they made BlueXP data classification free to NetApp storage users. This is a rich auto data classification that will help clean, remove irrelevant or duplicated data, identify sensitive data, and prepare data for training.
One other capability is FlexCache for GenAI. Suppose you have data residing in a New York data center and want to train on a cloud provider that has GPU available in Virginia. You can mount a volume using FlexCache in a different location and be able to spin up the environment to train.
As also would be expected, NetApp is further expanding the scale to support GenAI; for instance, the new 500TB with 700+K IOPS with Azure and scale out to 24 nodes (12 pairs) for AWS FSxOntap.
A couple more items they ‘snuck’ in here. Block storage for AWS’s FSx Ontap – which means NVMe/TCP is now available for the hard-to-please database and VDI applications. Now all the NetApp data efficiencies of snaps and clones for blocks are in the cloud.
Lastly, NetApp rolled out a few capabilities to support Google’s VMware Engine (their hosted VMware environment). The service makes it highly simplified to deploy VPC peering and networking, areas that can often be misconfigured. Users select the Google Cloud NetApp Cloud Volumes from their VPC Network peerings and the peering is completed automatically.
NetApp, jointly with the HyperScalers, continues to enhance their data offerings. While still the majority of the enterprise’s data and respectively NetApp’s revenue remains on-premises, this announcement demonstrates their understanding that we are in a world that needs to ebb and flow in all directions.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Now retired, Camberley brought over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
