NetApp, known for its expertise in intelligent data infrastructure, has unveiled new solutions in collaboration with NVIDIA aimed at enhancing generative AI. This innovative partnership combines NVIDIA’s AI software and accelerated computing with NetApp’s infrastructure, accelerating the development of agentic AI applications.
This new technology will significantly enhance the capabilities of NetApp ONTAP, a unified storage operating system. By leveraging a global metadata namespace, it unifies data across diverse storage systems. This capability allows enterprises to manage and access exabytes of data stored both in the cloud and on-premises, fostering accelerated retrieval augmented generation (RAG) capabilities for next-gen AI applications.
The technology stack integrates the NetApp AIPod architecture with ONTAP and BlueXP, the unified control plane, alongside NVIDIA’s NeMo Retriever and NIM microservices from the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform. This enables enterprises to discover, search, and curate data across varied environments, while complying with policy-based governance.
Harv Bhela, Chief Product Officer at NetApp, stated, “To power AI applications and drive transformative progress for their business, enterprises must unlock the potential of their data. 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.”
Manuvir Das, Vice President of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA, added, “Data is fundamental to the evolution of generative AI. By combining NVIDIA AI software and accelerated computing with NetApp intelligent data infrastructure, enterprises can turn their data into knowledge, and AI agents can turn that knowledge into action.”
These new AI capabilities, integrated into the NetApp AIPod and certified for NVIDIA DGX BasePOD and NVIDIA OVX solutions, will be managed through BlueXP. This enables users to easily discover, search, and manage data across on-premises and cloud environments while adhering to existing governance policies.
Once data collection is established via NetApp BlueXP, the data can be dynamically connected to NVIDIA NeMo Retriever. This integration processes and vectorizes datasets, ensuring they are ready for enterprise GenAI deployments with proper access controls and privacy measures. The aim is to set a foundation for a generative AI flywheel, autonomously accessing data to support customer service, business operations, and financial services.
From a security standpoint, the end-to-end integration prioritizes compliance and policy guardrails throughout the AI data and model lifecycle. Initially presented as a proof of concept by Huang during his NVIDIA GTC 2024 keynote, the secure GenAI integration will be showcased at NetApp INSIGHT and is expected to be previewed later this year.
In addition, NetApp has started the certification process of its ONTAP storage on the AFF A90 platform with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. This aims to help organizations harness top-tier data management for substantial AI projects. NetApp ONTAP’s existing certification with NVIDIA DGX BasePOD is also expected to be extended, aiming to address data management challenges in large language model training without compromising on data management efficacy.
