Google Cloud and NetApp are extending the NetApp Volumes storage service to work better with Vertex AI, support larger data sets, separately scale capacity and performance, and meet regional compliance needs,
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, GCNV for short, is a fully managed file service based on NetApp’s ONTAP operating system running on the Google Cloud Platform as a native GCP service. It supports NFS V3 and v4.1, and SMB, and provides snapshots, clones, replication, and cross-region backup. Google’s Vertex AI is a combined data engineering, data science, and ML engineering workflow platform for training, deploying, and customizing large language models (LLMs), and developing AI applications. It provides access to Google’s Gemini models, which work with text, images, video, or code, plus other models such as Anthropic’s Claude and Llama 3.2.
NetApp SVP and GM for Cloud Storage, Pravjit Tiwana, states: ”Our collaboration with Google Cloud is accelerating generative AI data pipelines by seamlessly integrating the latest AI innovations with the robust data management capabilities of NetApp ONTAP.”
He reckons: “The new capabilities of NetApp Volumes help customers scale their cloud storage to meet the demands of the modern, high-performance applications and datasets.”
The new capabilities in detail are:
- Coming NetApp Volumes integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Platform: so customers will be able to build custom agents without needing to build their own data pipeline management for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications.
- Improvements for Premium and Extreme Service Levels in all 14 regions where the Premium and Extreme service levels are offered. Customers can now provision a single volume starting at 15TiB that can be scaled up to 1PiB with up to 30 GiB/s of throughput. This means customers can move petabyte-scale datasets for workloads like EDA, AI applications, and content data repositories to NetApp Volumes without partitioning data across multiple volumes.
- Flex Service Level previewing of independent scaling of capacity and performance to avoid over-provisioning of capacity to meet their performance needs with the NetApp Volumes Flex service level. Users can create storage pools by individually selecting capacity, throughput and IOPS with the ability to scale throughput up to 5 GiB/s and IOPS up to 160K to optimize costs.
- NetApp Volumes will soon support the Assured Workloads framework that Google Cloud customers use to configure and maintain controlled environments operating within the parameters of a specific compliance regime, meeting the data residency, transparent access control, and cloud key management requirements specific to their region.
GCNV flex, standard, premium and extreme service level offerings can be researched here. The GCNV-Vertex AI integration is coming “soon.”
Proprietary data in GCNV will be able to be used via Vertex AI to implement model agent RAG capabilities.
NetApp has received the 2025 Google Cloud Infrastructure Modernization Partner of the Year for Storage award, which is a nice pat on the back.
Sameet Agarwal, Google Cloud Storage GM and VP, said: “Organizations can leverage their NetApp ONTAP on-premises data and hybrid cloud environments. By combining the capabilities of Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform with Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, we’re delivering a powerful solution to help customers accelerate digital transformation and position themselves for long-term success.”
