NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, and Google Cloud have announced new updates to Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, a fully managed file storage service. These improvements are designed to reduce complexity and boost performance for cloud storage workloads, while ensuring full integration with the broader Google Cloud service ecosystem. The new capabilities will enable customers to effortlessly scale enterprise applications and databases, even those managing petabyte-scale datasets such as electronic design automation (EDA), AI applications, and content data repositories.
As organisations move deeper into the era of intelligence, the ability to manage data seamlessly across on-premises and cloud environments has become crucial. Intelligent data infrastructure now plays a key role in breaking down silos and allowing real-time integration across hybrid-cloud systems, helping businesses turn raw data into actionable insights. The partnership between NetApp and Google Cloud aims to give businesses the tools they need to harness AI, encouraging greater agility and innovation on a larger scale.
Pravjit Tiwana, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Storage at NetApp, commented, “For many organisations, the cloud is the fastest and simplest path to using AI to uncover data-driven insights. Our collaboration with Google Cloud is accelerating generative AI data pipelines by seamlessly integrating the latest AI innovations with the robust data management capabilities of NetApp ONTAP. The new capabilities of NetApp Volumes help customers scale their cloud storage to meet the demands of the modern, high-performance applications and datasets that drive meaningful business outcomes.”
New features to support advanced workloads
Google Cloud and NetApp have introduced several key enhancements to NetApp Volumes to boost scalability and performance. One major update is the integration with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform. Customers will soon be able to access and use data stored in NetApp Volumes directly within Vertex AI. This integration will allow users to build custom agents without needing to develop their own solutions to manage data pipelines for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) applications.
Performance improvements have also been rolled out for Premium and Extreme service levels. These enhancements, now available across 14 regions, allow customers to provision a single large volume starting at 15TiB, scalable up to 1PiB. With throughput reaching up to 30 GiB/s, organisations can move petabyte-scale datasets without needing to partition them across multiple volumes. This is expected to simplify management and improve efficiency for large workloads including EDA, AI, and content data repositories.
The Flex service level has seen advancements as well. Customers can now preview the independent scaling of capacity and performance, helping them avoid overprovisioning. With the Flex service level, users will be able to create storage pools by individually selecting capacity, throughput, and IOPS. Throughput can scale up to 5 GiB/s and IOPS up to 160,000, enabling customers to right-size their storage requirements and better control costs.
In addition, NetApp Volumes will soon support Google Cloud’s Assured Workloads framework. This support will allow customers to easily configure and maintain controlled environments, meeting the specific compliance requirements of different regions. Customers will benefit from features such as data residency, transparent access control, and cloud key management solution compliance.
Customer perspectives on the partnership
Sameet Agarwal, Vice President and General Manager of Google’s Cloud Storage, emphasised the value of combining capabilities. He said, “Simplified access to AI is a democratising force enabling organisations to leverage their most critical asset—data—for a competitive edge. Organisations can leverage their NetApp ONTAP on-premises data and hybrid cloud environments. By combining the capabilities of Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform with Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, we’re delivering a powerful solution to help customers accelerate digital transformation and position themselves for long-term success.”
Stan Rock, Principal Technology Architect at OpenText, shared his experience using NetApp solutions. “At OpenText, we rely on NetApp for several critical storage technologies. On GCP we heavily rely on Google Cloud NetApp Volumes for our data storage needs,” he said. “The global availability of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes service levels and the broad range of capacity and performance provisioning options have helped us operate more efficiently and respond with agility to our changing business needs.”
NetApp and Google Cloud’s latest collaboration highlights their continued focus on helping enterprises manage complex data environments more effectively, paving the way for greater innovation and operational agility in the digital economy.
