SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the Intelligent Data Infrastructure company, announced enhancements to its enterprise-grade data platform, enabling customers to remove roadblocks to AI innovation. In addition to supporting the latest innovations from NVIDIA announced at GTC, NetApp is launching NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE)—a secure, unified AI data platform stack co-engineered with NVIDIA and integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.

A foundational challenge for AI is enabling enterprises to discover, understand, and govern the data they have across their global data estates. If data is AI’s fuel, finding and using the best data is essential to making truly transformative AI. NetApp AIDE helps enterprises solve this need through an automatically created—and continuously updated—global metadata catalog with powerful search capabilities. Critically, the NetApp AIDE metadata catalog goes beyond standard file system metadata and actively analyzes file content to semantically enrich metadata in place, rather than introducing additional security concerns and expense by moving the data multiple times. This enriched metadata enables enterprises to find, curate, use, and govern data in order to feed and use the correct and most up-to-date data throughout the AI data pipeline—from selection and transformation through retrieval and serving to AI applications and agents.

“Despite massive investments and market pressures to leverage AI for improved productivity and enhanced business decision making, data challenges are bottlenecking projects before they even reach production,” said Syam Nair, Chief Product Officer at NetApp. “To take back control of their data, customers need a mature enterprise-grade data platform that was designed disaggregated and intelligent from the beginning so that storage, services, and control scale independently without lock-in. Leveraging the NetApp data platform, including NetApp AIDE and support for NVIDIA’s leading AI capabilities, we’re helping customers build enterprise grade AI factories supported by our high-performance unified storage platform.”

NetApp AIDE will be launching this month for an initial wave of lighthouse customers and partners, with broad availability coming early summer. As a strong champion of open technology ecosystems NetApp will also continue to deliver integrations across a number of ISV partners, both on-premises and in the cloud, providing the deep and seamless integrations essential for customers bringing production AI workloads to life. Examples of these ISV partner integrations that will be available very soon include leading AI app development platforms and frameworks built on hyperscale cloud services such as Microsoft Azure‑based AI applications, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, and LangChain, enabling customers to rapidly build AI apps that securely leverage their unstructured enterprise data, continuously made AI-ready in-place.

Over the next few months, NetApp AIDE will extend to support an increasing number of deployment options, giving customers broad infrastructure flexibility. AIDE is an integrated set of software solutions that customers will soon be able to run on various server options to help best suit customers’ individual use cases and needs. For example, customers will be able to use NetApp AIDE across their data estate with the new NVIDIA RTX PRO™ 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs announced today at NVIDIA GTC and NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. NetApp AIDE will also quickly extend to support deployments directly into a wide variety of new and existing NetApp storage environments—including AFF A-Series, AFF C-Series, and FAS.

And, this summer, NetApp AIDE will add several more capabilities. Expansive hybrid cloud support will bring NetApp AIDE capabilities to enterprise data no matter where it lives—seamlessly across on-premises and cloud storage. NetApp AIDE will also evolve to include new multimodal data capabilities—extending the breadth of NetApp AIDE capabilities to include visual data, unlocking powerful new use cases on a range of unstructured data. And, robust agentic AI support will enable seamless, secure, governed agentic workflows on enterprise data—across a global NetApp data estate—all supporting popular, industry standard protocols.

“Through our partnership, NetApp and Cisco are delivering enterprise-grade infrastructure that accelerates AI adoption,” said Jeremy Foster, SVP and GM, Cisco Compute. “FlexPod AI—part of the Cisco AI POD portfolio—brings together the full stack of compute, storage, networking, security and observability capabilities our customers need to anchor their AI factories. Using NetApp AIDE with this solution moves AI to our customers' data, right where it lives, speeding up data pipelines and delivering value faster.”

To further enhance the NetApp data platform’s ability to support AI innovation, NetApp will support NVIDIA STX, a modular, rack-scale storage reference architecture for agentic AI. Built with NVIDIA Vera Rubin and NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs, STX will deliver a high-performance data engine with a specialized memory tier for KV-cache storage, improving power efficiency, throughput, and security. Leveraging NetApp data management capabilities in this new reference architecture, customers will be able to bridge the gap between massive AI compute and unstructured data storage by centralizing intelligent data handling.

“The fundamental demand for AI factories is pushing enterprises to find new ways to govern and utilize their vast data estates for generating business value,” said Jason Hardy, Vice President, Storage Technologies at NVIDIA. “By integrating with NVIDIA's AI Data Platform reference architecture, NetApp provides a framework for enterprises to efficiently manage data for large-scale AI deployments.”