NetApp builds AI infrastructure on NVIDIA AI data platform

Author: Simon Rowley

NetApp, the intelligent data infrastructure company, has announced that it is working with NVIDIA to support the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design in the NetApp AIPod solution to accelerate enterprise adoption of agentic AI. Powered by NetApp ONTAP, NetApp AIPod deployments built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform aim to help businesses build secure, governed, and scalable AI data pipelines for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and inferencing.

As an NVIDIA-Certified Storage partner leveraging the NVIDIA AI Data Platform, NetApp gives NetApp AIPod users data infrastructure with built-in intelligence. NetApp intends to give customers confidence that they have the enterprise data management capabilities and scalable multi-tenancy needed to eliminate data siloes so they can develop and operate high-performance AI factories and deploy agentic AI to solve real-world business problems.

“A unified and comprehensive understanding of business data is the vehicle that will help companies drive competitive advantage in the era of intelligence, and AI inferencing is the key,” says Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. “We have always believed that a unified approach to data storage is essential for businesses to get the most out of their data. The rise of agentic AI has only reinforced that truly unified data storage goes beyond just multi-protocol storage. Businesses need to eliminate silos throughout their entire IT environment, whether on-premises and in the cloud, and across every business function, and we are working with NVIDIA to deliver connected storage for the unique demands of AI.”

The NetApp AIPod solution built on the NVIDIA AI Data Platform incorporates NVIDIA accelerated computing to run NVIDIA NeMo Retriever microservices and connects these nodes to scalable storage. Using this reference design enables customers to scan, index, classify and retrieve large stores of private and public documents in real time. The intention is to augment AI agents as they reason and plan to solve complex, multistep problems, helping enterprises turn data into knowledge and boost agentic AI accuracy across many use cases.

“Agentic AI enables businesses to solve complex problems with superhuman efficiency and accuracy, but only as long as agents and reasoning models have fast access to high-quality data,” says Rob Davis, Vice President of Storage Technology at NVIDIA. “The NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design and NetApp’s high-powered storage and mature data management capabilities bring AI directly to business data and drive unprecedented productivity.”

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