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NetApp Expands Capabilities for Strategic Cloud Workloads
NetApp, a data infrastructure company, announced new capabilities for strategic cloud workloads, including GenAI and VMware. These enhancements to NetApp's data and storage services aim to reduce the resources and risks for customers managing these workloads across hybrid multi-cloud environments.
“Strategic workloads, including GenAI and virtualized environments, are driving business innovation and have increasingly complex and resource-intensive infrastructure requirements that are pushing IT teams to the limit,” said Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager of cloud Storage at NetApp. “NetApp is helping customers regain control of their data with an intelligent data infrastructure that leverages unified data storage, integrated data services, and automated cloud operations. Even when they are up against specific and nuanced technology requirements for modern workloads, NetApp gives them the tools they need to optimize and simplify their data operations in their environments across the hybrid multi-cloud.”
NetApp is announcing new capabilities to advance intelligent data infrastructure deployments for strategic workloads like GenAI and VMware environments, including:
NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory for AWS: This service automates the planning, provisioning, and management of cloud resources and services for key workloads, including GenAI, VMware cloud environments, and enterprise databases. It optimizes deployment time, cost, performance, and resource protection. It simplifies workload migrations to the cloud by profiling infrastructure requirements, comparing resource options, and provisioning selected resources. AWS users can read guidance on deploying this capability in the AWS Solutions Library.
NetApp GenAI Toolkit for Microsoft Azure NetApp Files: This toolkit allows customers to include private enterprise data stored in Azure NetApp Files in their retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows securely. This enhances the ability to generate unique, high-quality results from GenAI projects by combining proprietary data with pre-trained foundational models (FMs).
Amazon Bedrock with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Reference Architecture: AWS and NetApp released a joint reference architecture for implementing RAG-enabled workflows, integrating proprietary data stored on Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP into GenAI data pipelines. This enables the secure use of proprietary data with customizable high-performing FMs.
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Enhancements: AWS announced the next-generation Amazon FSx for ONTAP cloud storage service with enhanced capabilities. It provides up to 6 GB per second of throughput for a single highly available (HA) pair from 512 TiB of SSD storage. For large-scale workloads like GenAI, second-generation systems support dynamic scalability by adding HA pairs as needed, up to 24 nodes, delivering up to 72 GB per second of throughput from 1 PiB of SSD storage.
NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery Support for VMFS: The BlueXP disaster recovery service now supports VMFS datastores for on-premises to on-premises disaster recovery, providing guided workflows to design and execute automated disaster recovery plans for VMware workloads.
These updates build on NetApp’s existing offerings that support storage and data operations for high-powered strategic workloads like GenAI and VMware environments. NetApp also announced that its BlueXP data classification capability, which classifies and categorizes data for governance and secure ingestion into GenAI and RAG data pipelines, is now available free of charge to all NetApp customers.
“When it comes to GenAI, the prime focus for organizations is to adapt their data strategies to ensure they can balance data security, cost efficiency, and innovation as they leverage pre-built LLMs to surface relevant, useful insights from their proprietary, business-relevant data,” said Archana Venkatraman, Senior Research Director, Cloud Data Management at IDC. “NetApp’s intelligent data infrastructure capabilities can help customers overcome the data challenges and offer specific guidance to automate workflows that can securely feed private data directly into public cloud providers’ LLMs. In addition, NetApp’s BlueXP data classification capability has the potential to mitigate the risks in data operations for AI because it allows users to discover and categorize data so that the right data is fed into the right model without exposing confidential, personal or restricted information.”
“Organisations are now facing different economic realities with regards to virtualized environments, and we all need to move quickly to address recent industry shifts,” said Derek Elbert, Solutions Architect at WWT. “Optimising the cost versus performance equation of VMware workloads has become a primary initiative for us, to continue to provide scalability and performance while reducing unnecessary system and software resources. NetApp’s offerings, such as the BlueXP disaster recovery service and the optimization metrics from Cloud Insights, help us better ensure the right levels of resource allocation and protection schemes for virtual environments, allowing us to focus on putting our infrastructure to work without killing the FinOps metrics.”