To address business challenges and unlock new use cases, having a massive amount of data is only part of the solution; without intelligence and security, data remains isolated, just waiting to be stolen by cybercriminals.
This was among key takeaways from Harv Bhela, Chief Product Officer of NetApp, during his presentation at NetApp INSIGHT 2024 in Las Vegas. Bhela outlined five innovation areas that the company is currently prioritising to address their customers’ most urgent challenges.
“The world is moving fast for our customers. They tell us that they need us to deliver a rapid pace of innovation so they can extract maximum value from their data. This, in turn, enables them to transform data into a competitive advantage,” he said.
Unified data storage
In its unified data storage segment, NetApp introduced its ASA A-Series storage systems, designed to streamline storage management while supporting block storage needs.
To enhance the ASA A-Series, NetApp has upgraded its Data Infrastructure Insights service, previously known as Cloud Insights, to improve monitoring and analysis for the ASA platform. New features reportedly include increased visibility, optimisation, and reliability across customers’ data infrastructure.
“Unified data storage is the core of what we do at NetApp. We offer performance and design options at various price points, all underpinned by a single architecture and platform that simplifies management for our customers,” Bhela explained.
Cloud storage
In addition to supporting customers on-premises, NetApp is integrated into the platforms of the three major cloud providers: AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
“We’re making it easier for customers to onboard new workloads into the cloud by introducing new performance tiers and additional price points,” Bhela revealed. “This means customers can use our platform not only for high-performance workloads but also for less demanding ones. From a customer perspective, this provides more options for workloads, performance, and pricing.”
With more enterprises leveraging generative AI to address business challenges, Bhela underscored the importance of enhancing cloud capabilities for NetApp customers.
“AI is inherently hybrid — training typically occurs in the cloud, while data often resides on-premises. NetApp provides a hybrid multi-cloud workflow designed to support these AI processes seamlessly,” he added.
Anti-ransomware
Across industries and regions, ransomware has become a top board-level concern, Bhela observed.
“The primary worry is the impact of a security breach where data is held for ransom. Not only does it disrupt operations, but it also affects a company’s brand reputation with customers. People feel uneasy when they learn of a ransomware incident and data exposure,” he remarked.
In response, NetApp has focused on building anti-ransomware protection within its storage platform, aiming to serve as a final line of defence for customers.
“From a capabilities standpoint, we have built ML-based models inside storage to detect anomalies, such as attempted ransomware attacks. Customers can create workflows triggered by these detections to stop the attacker, snapshot the data, or take other defensive actions,” Bhela said.
He noted that some attackers are smart and employ a slow approach, encrypting data gradually over time. This tactic means that when customers attempt data recovery, they may need to review multiple backups to find a reliable version of their data.
Given the urgency for businesses to recover compromised data quickly, NetApp’s ONTAP Autonomous Ransomware Protection with AI (ARP/AI) solution includes automated workflows that assess previous backups and snapshots, identifying which to use for data recovery. This enables customers to merge snapshots to restore clean data.
“We’re a data company, not a security company, so we can only tell customers that something is wrong, help them recover, and build workflows from that. Every anti-ransomware feature we developed was based on the attacks our customers faced. They told us what tools would help minimise downtime and restore operations,” Bhela explained.
Enterprise AI
Enterprises face a mountain of challenges when scaling AI across all workloads, often due to unstructured data.
“A lot of customers don’t know which data to use. They don’t even know where their data is, or which data is personal identifiable information (PII) and which is not,” Bhela said.
To support responsible AI, organisations need insight into their data to meet regulatory requirements. To this end, NetApp announced several planned initiatives and enhancements to support enterprises in their AI journey:
- NetApp has started the Nvidia certification process for ONTAP storage on the AFF A90 platform with Nvidia DGX SuperPOD infrastructure, aimed at supporting large-scale AI projects.
- The company is creating a global metadata namespace to securely manage data across hybrid multi-cloud environments, enabling data classification and feature extraction for AI.
- NetApp plans to implement a directly integrated AI data pipeline, enabling the ONTAP operating system to prepare unstructured data for AI automatically and iteratively. This process captures incremental changes to the customer data set, applies policy-driven classification and anonymisation, generates highly compressible vector embeddings, and stores them in a vector database integrated with the ONTAP data model. The data is then ready for high-scale, low-latency semantic searches and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) inferencing.
- NetApp is working to enable a disaggregated storage architecture with shared back-end storage to increase network and flash speed utilisation and reduce infrastructure costs.
- Finally, NetApp is developing a centralised data platform to ingest, discover, and catalogue data, integrating with data warehouses and creating tools for visualising, preparing, and transforming data. A planned integration will allow Google Cloud NetApp Volumes to function as a data store for BigQuery and Vertex AI.
Consumption flexibility
To drive innovation, Bhela highlighted the importance of a flexible consumption model suited for enterprises of all sizes.
“We want customers to consume our products the way they want to. They can buy upfront, use storage as a service, or buy directly from us or through partners. They have complete flexibility in how they access our solutions,” he said.
Looking ahead, Bhela emphasised that NetApp’s product strategy will remain focused on meeting customers’ immediate needs.
“We believe innovation is only valuable if everyone can benefit from it. We’re helping democratise enterprise AI, making it easier for enterprises worldwide by using NetApp storage as a data foundation for AI,” he concluded.
