AI Arms Race Heats Up: NetApp's Data Arsenal Takes Center Stage
- By CDOTrends editors
- September 29, 2024
With GenAI rapidly reshaping the tech landscape, the ability to manage, secure, and leverage massive amounts of data is vital. It’s also a new battleground for tech vendors.
NetApp is the latest tech player to fire a new salvo, unveiling a series of groundbreaking collaborations and technological advancements designed to put them at the forefront of this AI revolution at the NetApp INSIGHT 2024.
The stakes couldn't be higher. Gartner predicts that spending on AI software will skyrocket to a staggering USD297.9 billion by 2027, with GenAI accounting for a massive chunk of that investment. The key to unlocking this AI goldmine? Mastery over data — data that is governable, trusted, and traceable.
At the NetApp global event, chief executive officer George Kurian painted a bold picture of this data-driven future. He argued that AI is fundamentally a data challenge, and the solution lies in intelligent data infrastructure. Such infrastructure, Kurian insisted, can ensure the relevant data is secure, governed, and constantly updated, feeding a unified, integrated GenAI stack.
New data and storage innovations
NetApp is putting its money where its mouth is, unveiling a raft of innovations at INSIGHT 2024. One of the most significant is a transformative vision for AI running on NetApp ONTAP. This includes:
NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD storage certification: NetApp is pursuing NVIDIA certification for its ONTAP storage on the AFF A90 platform with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI infrastructure, enabling organizations to leverage industry-leading data management capabilities for their largest AI projects.
Global metadata namespace: This will allow the exploration and management of data across hybrid multi-cloud environments, enabling feature extraction and data classification for AI.
Directly integrated AI data pipeline: This will make unstructured data ready for AI automatically and iteratively, performing policy-driven data classification, generating highly compressible vector embeddings, and storing them for high-scale, low-latency semantic searches and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) inferencing.
Disaggregated storage architecture: This will enable full sharing of the storage backend, maximizing utilization and lowering costs for compute-intensive AI workloads like LLM training while maintaining ONTAP's resiliency, data management, security, and governance features.
New cloud services capabilities: These will drive AI innovation in the cloud by providing an integrated data platform to ingest, discover, and catalog data, integrating with data warehouses, and developing data processing services. A planned integration will allow customers to use Google Cloud NetApp Volumes as a data store for BigQuery and Vertex AI.
“Organizations of all sizes are experimenting with GenAI to increase efficiency and accelerate innovation,” said Krish Vitaldevara, senior vice president for platform at NetApp. “NetApp empowers organizations to harness the full potential of GenAI to drive innovation and create value across diverse industry applications.”
NetApp is not going it alone in this AI offensive. They're forging strategic partnerships across the AI ecosystem, including collaborations with Domino Data Labs and Lenovo.
Mike Leone, practice director for data analytics & AI at the Enterprise Strategy Group, sees NetApp's collaborative approach as a key strength. "Implementing AI requires a collection of finely tuned pieces of technology infrastructure to work together perfectly," he said. "By collaborating with other industry-leading vendors in the AI infrastructure space, NetApp customers can be confident that their compute, networking, storage, and AI software solutions will integrate seamlessly to drive AI innovation."
Bottom line
NetApp's vision is clear: to be the intelligent data infrastructure backbone that powers the AI revolution. With their relentless focus on innovation, strategic partnerships, and a deep understanding of businesses' data challenges, NetApp is positioning itself to be a significant player in the AI era. The battle for dominance has only just begun.
Image credit: iStockphoto/vectortatu