NetApp and NVIDIA have announced a collaboration focused on developing intelligent data infrastructure to support agentic AI reasoning solutions. NetApp will integrate its technology with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design to help businesses utilize their data for AI reasoning inference.
The collaboration aims to address the increasing need for businesses to manage and leverage large amounts of data for AI applications. NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure, combined with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, is designed to enable a unified approach to data management, incorporating metadata cataloging, automation, and hybrid cloud capabilities. This framework intends to break down data silos and provide actionable insights throughout the AI development process.
NetApp ONTAP, the company’s data management software, will work with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform to create distributed systems that aim to unlock the value of business data for data-driven actions. The NVIDIA AI Data Platform provides a customizable blueprint that combines NVIDIA’s accelerated computing, networking, and AI software with enterprise storage solutions. This platform is designed to transform data into actionable intelligence.
Through this collaboration, NetApp customers using the NVIDIA AI Data Platform will be able to connect their data to AI reasoning workloads. This will involve using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including NVIDIA AI-Q Blueprints and NVIDIA NIM microservices for models like NVIDIA Llama Nemotron Reason. NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, NVIDIA networking, and the NVIDIA Dynamo open-source inference library are intended to facilitate near real-time insights.
Krish Vitaldevara, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Platform at NetApp, stated that traditional computing architectures are insufficient for the AI era. He emphasized that the collaboration between NVIDIA and NetApp aims to provide customers with the necessary tools to strategically use their data for the next generation of AI applications. He added that combining the NVIDIA AI Data Platform with NetApp ONTAP’s data management capabilities will allow enterprises to integrate AI with their data while maintaining security and compliance.
NetApp is developing specific capabilities to support the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, including:
- Global Metadata Namespace: This feature will allow customers to securely discover, manage, and analyze data across hybrid multicloud environments for AI feature extraction and data classification.
- Integrated AI Data Pipeline: This will enable more automated preparation of unstructured data for AI applications through change tracking, efficient replication with NetApp SnapMirror, data classification, and the creation of compressed vector embeddings for semantic searches in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) inference.
- Disaggregated Storage Architecture: This architecture is designed to help customers optimize network and flash speeds and infrastructure costs for high performance in compute-intensive AI workloads while minimizing space and power consumption.
This collaboration builds on the existing relationship between NetApp and NVIDIA, which includes a previous announcement regarding generative AI data vision and integrated solutions for enterprise RAG applications. Kari Briski, Vice President, Generative AI Software for Enterprise at NVIDIA, noted that enterprise data holds significant information for AI reasoning, but its unstructured nature often makes it difficult to extract meaning. She stated that the combination of NetApp and the NVIDIA AI Data Platform will create a continuous data pipeline, making business data readily available to AI agents for informed decision-making.
