NetApp, a leader in intelligent data infrastructure, has announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to drive advancements in AI reasoning. By integrating the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design with its data infrastructure, NetApp aims to help businesses harness their data more effectively to enhance AI inference and decision-making.
Enhancing AI-driven decision-making with intelligent data infrastructure
As businesses move into an era where AI-driven intelligence is critical, traditional data strategies need a transformation. Companies are generating vast amounts of data, but leveraging it effectively for competitive advantage remains a challenge. NetApp is addressing this by introducing an intelligent data infrastructure framework, which integrates metadata cataloging, automation, and hybrid cloud capabilities. This approach eliminates data silos and provides insights at every stage of the AI workflow.
Through the collaboration, NetApp ONTAP and the NVIDIA AI Data Platform are enabling businesses to create distributed systems that maximise the value of their data. NVIDIA’s expertise in AI workflow optimisation supports a customisable reference design, combining accelerated computing, networking, and enterprise storage with AI software to transform data into actionable intelligence.
The partnership allows NetApp customers to connect their data for AI-driven reasoning using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, including NVIDIA AI-Q Blueprints and NVIDIA NIM microservices. The NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, advanced networking, and the NVIDIA Dynamo open-source inference library provide real-time insights to enhance AI-powered applications.
Advanced capabilities for AI pipeline acceleration
To support the vision of the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, NetApp is rolling out new capabilities to help businesses streamline their AI workflows:
- Global metadata namespace – Provides secure access, management, and analysis of data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This enables efficient feature extraction and classification for AI applications.
- Integrated AI data pipeline – Automates the preparation of unstructured data for AI use. This includes tracking data changes, leveraging NetApp SnapMirror for replication, classifying data, and compressing vector embeddings for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) inference.
- Disaggregated storage architecture – Optimises network speeds, flash storage, and infrastructure costs, ensuring high performance with minimal space and power requirements for AI workloads.
NetApp’s latest initiatives build on its longstanding collaboration with NVIDIA. This includes an end-to-end AI data management strategy, combining NVIDIA AI software with NetApp’s infrastructure to power future agentic AI applications.
Unlocking enterprise data for AI reasoning
“Traditional computing architectures and data management techniques are not up to the task of helping businesses thrive in the AI era,” said Krish Vitaldevara, senior vice president and general manager, platform at NetApp. “NVIDIA and NetApp are collaborating to give customers the tools they need to strategically unlock their data to drive the next wave of AI applications. By combining the NVIDIA AI Data Platform with the rich and mature data and AI management capabilities and services of NetApp ONTAP, enterprises can more easily bring AI to their data while maintaining security and compliance to achieve their goals of becoming data-driven businesses.”
NVIDIA also highlighted the importance of structured AI data pipelines. Kari Briski, Vice President, Generative AI Software for Enterprise at NVIDIA, stated: “Enterprise data is a rich source of information for AI reasoning, but the vast majority of enterprise data is unstructured, making it difficult to extract insights and meaning. Bringing together NetApp and the NVIDIA AI Data Platform creates a data pipeline that’s always on, allowing business data to be readily available to AI agents so they can rapidly access information to make informed decisions.”
With AI becoming central to business innovation, the NetApp-NVIDIA partnership aims to provide enterprises with a smarter and more efficient way to harness their data. By bridging AI technology with intelligent data infrastructure, they are setting the stage for a new wave of AI-driven business transformation.
