As GenAI rapidly reshapes the technology landscape, the ability to manage, secure and leverage massive amounts of data is vital. It’s also a new battleground for technology providers.
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 global AI revolution. NetApp INSIGHT2024.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Gartner predicted that spending on AI software will skyrocket to a staggering $297.9 billion by 2027, with GenAI accounting for a considerable portion of this investment. The key to unlocking this AI goldmine? Data control: governable, reliable and traceable data.
At the NetApp Global Event, CEO Georges 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 that relevant data is secure, governed and constantly updated, powering a unified and integrated GenAI stack.
New innovations in data and storage
NetApp is walking the talk by unveiling a series of innovations at INSIGHT 2024. One of the biggest is a transformative vision of AI running on NetApp ONTAP. This includes:
NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD Storage Certification: NetApp pursues 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 biggest AI projects.
Global metadata namespace: This will enable data exploration and management in hybrid multi-cloud environments, enabling feature extraction and data classification for AI.
Directly integrated AI data pipeline: This will make unstructured data AI-ready automatically and iteratively, performing policy-based data classification, generating highly compressible vector embeddings and storing them for large-scale, low-latency semantic searches and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). ) inference.
Disaggregated storage architecture: This will enable complete sharing of the storage backend, maximizing utilization and reducing costs of compute-intensive AI workloads like LLM training while retaining features of resilience, data management, security and governance of ONTAP.
New cloud services capabilities: They 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 services data processing. 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 VitaldevaraSenior Vice President of Platform at NetApp. “NetApp enables organizations to harness the full potential of GenAI to drive innovation and create value across diverse industrial applications. »
NetApp is not going it alone in this AI offensive. They are forging strategic partnerships in the AI ecosystem, including collaborations with Domino Data Labs and Lenovo.
Mike Leonepractice director for data analytics and AI at Corporate Strategy Groupconsiders NetApp’s collaborative approach to be a major asset. “Implementing AI requires a set of finely tuned technology infrastructure elements to work perfectly together,” he said. “By collaborating with other industry-leading AI infrastructure vendors, NetApp customers can be confident that their compute, networking, storage and AI software solutions will integrate seamlessly to drive AI innovation.
Conclusion
NetApp’s vision is clear: to be the intelligent data infrastructure that powers the AI revolution. With a relentless focus on innovation, strategic partnerships and a deep understanding of enterprise data challenges, NetApp is positioning itself to become a significant player in the AI era. The battle for dominance has only just begun.
Image credit: iStockphoto/vectortatu
