NetApp Advances State of AI With New Capabilities
- By Paul Mah
- November 01, 2023
NetApp last week announced various new systems and capabilities that it says will help enterprises drive their data science and AI initiatives.
As noted in a blog post, it has extended the definition of unified data storage to include file, block, and object workloads in a common operating system – both on-premises and across the top three public cloud providers.
Indeed, NetApp says it is the only company to deliver the same enterprise storage offering on-premises and as a native first-party service in Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Data pipeline for AI
Enterprises typically struggle to get meaningful results from massive amounts of data flowing through multiple data pipelines. Data might live in various data repositories across the enterprises, either on-premises or in the cloud. These silos result in a lack of visibility into data types and locations, increasing design and operational complexity for AI workloads.
NetApp says its data-centric software can now let customers leverage both high-performance on-premises storage appliances to cloud storage to build modern data lakes and accelerate AI. Enterprises can hence leverage NetApp’s solution to deploy scalable and performant AI data pipelines across hybrid multi-cloud data estate.
NetApp also announced the addition of the AFF C-Series with capacity flash to its ONTAP AI architecture for improved affordability and sustainability. ONTAP AI is a converged infrastructure stack that incorporates the Nvidia DGX platform to let enterprises tackle complex AI workloads without the design and deployment complexity of a self-deployed solution.
Apart from ease of use, AI engineers and data scientists would find it easier to trace multiple AI model versions in production back to their training data for responsible AI. Moreover, storage is integrated with MLOps platforms to simplify workflows and increase the productivity of data scientists.
Storage at scale
“Enterprises that want to tap into the power of generative AI need a platform that can deliver fully customized models leveraging the immense corpus of their business data, tailored to their unique vocabulary, intellectual property, and industry,” explained Charlie Boyle, vice president, DGX platform at Nvidia.
“Powered by NVIDIA DGX systems and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, NetApp ONTAP AI enables businesses to tap into their data to deliver generative AI applications by leveraging a scalable, efficient, rapidly deployable infrastructure solution.”
According to Andrew Sotiropoulos, senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Asia Pacific, AI adoption continues to grow, especially in the Asia Pacific. For AI implementations to be successful, however, he notes that organizations must have a holistic strategy across their organization – which includes the management of data pipeline and storage.
“NetApp contributes to AI as we provide scalable, secure, and efficient storage solutions which enable organizations to unlock new AI opportunities for innovation and business growth,” he summed up.
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Khanchit Khirisutchalual
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.