NetApp announced all-flash SAN arrays, a generative AI vision, and AI-influenced updates across its product line at its NetApp INSIGHT 2024 event in Las Vegas.
It has begun the Nvidia certification process for its ONTAP AFF A90 storage array with Nvidia’s DGX SuperPOD AI infrastructure. This certification will complement and build upon NetApp ONTAP’s existing certification with the DGX BasePOD. NetApp’s E-Series is already SuperPOD-certified.
ONTAP now has a directly integrated AI data pipeline, allowing ONTAP to make unstructured data ready for AI automatically and iteratively by capturing incremental changes to the customer data set, performing policy-driven data classification and anonymization. It then generates highly compressible vector embeddings and stores them in a vector database integrated with the ONTAP data model, ready for high-scale, low-latency semantic searches and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) inferencing.
NetApp separately announced today a new integration with Nvidia AI software that can leverage the global metadata namespace with ONTAP to power enterprise RAG for agentic AI. The namespace can unify data stores for the tens of thousands of ONTAP systems. The overall architecture brings together NetApp’s AIPod, ONTAP, the BlueXP unified control plane, and Nvidia’s NeMo Retriever and NIM microservices.
Harvinder Bhela, NetApp chief product officer, stated: “Combining the NetApp data management engine and Nvidia AI software empowers AI applications to securely access and leverage vast amounts of data, paving the way for intelligent, agentic AI that tackles complex business challenges and fuels innovation.”
NetApp customers will be able to discover, search, and curate data on-premises and in the public cloud, based on a set of criteria, honoring existing policy-based governance policies. Once the data collection has been established through BlueXP, it can be dynamically connected to NeMo Retriever, where the dataset will be processed and vectorized to be accessible for enterprise GenAI deployments with appropriate access controls and privacy guardrails.
This, NetApp claims, “creates the foundation for a generative AI flywheel to power next-generation agentic AI applications that can autonomously and securely tap into data to complete a broad range of tasks to support customer service, business operations, financial services and more.”
Other AI news
NetApp is working to provide an integrated and centralized data platform to ingest, discover, and catalog data across all its native cloud services. It is also integrating its cloud services with data warehouses and developing data processing services to visualize, prepare, and transform data. The prepared datasets can then be securely shared and used with the cloud providers’ AI and machine learning services, including third-party offerings.
Krish Vitaldevara, SVP Platform at NetApp, said: “NetApp empowers organizations to harness the full potential of GenAI to drive innovation and create value across diverse industry applications. By providing secure, scalable, and high-performance intelligent data infrastructure that integrates with other industry-leading platforms, NetApp helps customers overcome barriers to implementing GenAI.”
NetApp’s AIPod with Lenovo ThinkSystem servers for Nvidia OVX converged infrastructure system, designed for enterprises aiming to harness GenAI and RAG capabilities, is now generally available.
FlexPod AI, the converged system built with Cisco UCS compute, Cisco networking, and NetApp storage, now has new AI features. When running RAG, it simplifies, automates, and secures AI applications.
Additionally, F5 and NetApp announced an expanded collaboration to accelerate and streamline enterprise AI capabilities using secure multi-cloud networking solutions from F5 and NetApp’s suite of data management solutions. This collaboration leverages F5 Distributed Cloud Services to streamline the use of large language models (LLMs) across hybrid cloud environments. F5 said that by integrating F5’s secure multi-cloud networking with NetApp’s data management, enterprises can implement RAG solutions efficiently and securely, enhancing the performance, security, and utility of their AI systems.
ONTAP ransomware protection
NetApp is announcing the general availability of its NetApp ONTAP Autonomous Ransomware Protection with AI (ARP/AI) solution, with 99 percent accuracy for detecting ransomware threats. Customers can use ARP/AI to monitor abnormal workload activity and automatically snapshot data at the point in time of attack, so they can respond and recover faster from attacks. ARP/AI uses machine learning to identify threats, and NetApp will consistently release new models. Customers can non-disruptively update those models, independent of ONTAP updates, to defend against the latest ransomware variants.
The BlueXP control plane now integrates with Splunk SIEM to simplify and accelerate threat response by informing stakeholders across an organization’s security operations. BlueXP ransomware protection uses AI-driven data classification capabilities to ensure the most sensitive data is protected at the highest levels. BlueXP also has new User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) integrations to identify malicious activity in user behavior in addition to the ARP/AI-provided file system signals.
Gagan Gulati, VP and GM for Data Services at NetApp, stated: “Data storage systems are the last line of defense against a cybersecurity incident and NetApp takes that as a responsibility to provide the most secure storage on the planet.”
ASA A-Series
There are three new models: ASA A70, A90 and A1K, the same names as the latest NetApp AFF products announced in May. At the time, we wrote that the A70 and A90 are like storage appliances, having integrated controller and drive shelves, whereas the A1K is modular, with separate 2RU controller and 2RU x 24-slot storage drive chassis. They have Sapphire Rapids gen 4 Xeon SP controller processors and are powered by the ONTAP OS providing unified file and block storage.
Sandeep Singh, SVP and GM of Enterprise Storage at NetApp, stated: “With the new NetApp ASA A-Series systems, our customers can modernize their operations to meet the demands of more powerful workloads on block storage without having to choose between operational simplicity and high-end capabilities.”
NetApp’s ASA arrays are positioned as being block-only for SAN workloads and have a symmetric, active-active controller architecture, but still run ONTAP. The new ASA models use the same AFF A70, A90, and A1K hardware. We envisage that the existing ASA400 is to be succeeded by the ASA A70, the ASA A800 by the ASA A90, and the ASA A900 by the latest ASA A1K.
NetApp’s John Shirley, VP of Product Management for Enterprise Storage, blogs: “The updated UI incorporates familiar concepts and terminology used by SAN administrators” with “storage units – LUNs and NVMe namespaces – are consolidated on a single page for a cohesive view.” There is “built-in full-stack AIOps for predictive and proactive insights, observability, and optimization.”
To support the new ASA A-Series, NetApp has enhanced its Data Infrastructure Insights service, formerly Cloud Insights, with updates so that customers can better manage visibility, optimization, and reliability for their data infrastructure to increase savings and performance.
NetApp has also added to its portfolio of hybrid flash storage arrays with new FAS 70 mid-range and FAS 90 high-end FAS systems, which offer “affordable, yet high-performing backup storage, enabling a secure cyber vault for recovery from ransomware attacks.” The company’s ONTAP Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) and WORM are available for no additional cost with Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO).
There are new features generally available for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and Azure NetApp Files. For Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, the Premium and Extreme service levels now can provision large volumes starting at 15 TiB that can be scaled up to 1 PiB dynamically in increments of 1 GiB. Google Cloud customers can achieve cost savings through auto tiering, which moves less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage service levels.
Azure NetApp Files customers can achieve cost savings through cool access auto tiering, which moves less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage services. Additionally, users can improve data availability with cross-zone replication, enhancing data protection by replicating volumes across Azure availability zones.
BlueXP, NetApp’s unified management facility, has been updated so that it streamlines the ONTAP upgrade process with a service that identifies potential candidates, validates compatibility, reports on recommendations and benefits, and executes selected updates through intuitive wizards.
The new ASA A-Series systems are available for quoting and will begin shipping shortly. Get a datasheet here. It had not been updated with the three new ASA A-Series systems when we looked, though.
