Insight 2023: NetApp Enhanced Data Pipeline for Hybrid Multi-Cloud AI and Advancements on Secure Storage Vs. Ransomware

At Insight 2023, NetApp, Inc. announced multiple portfolio updates, including enhancements to the industry’s data pipeline for hybrid multi-cloud AI and advancements on secure storage vs. ransomware.

These illustrate the company’s industry solutions drive simplicity, savings, security, and sustainability for customers.

“There are two major disruptions today for customers: the opportunity of AI and the threat of ransomware,” said Harv Bhela, CPO. “Today, NetApp unveiled new innovations that make the AI data pipeline simple to deploy as well as scalable and performant across your hybrid multi-cloud data estate – while protecting that same data from ever-increasing threats. These solutions position us at the forefront of creating successful business AI outcomes for our customers.”

Industry’s data pipeline for AI

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To stay competitive, enterprises must innovate and boost efficiency through their AI initiatives but may struggle to get meaningful results from massive amounts of disparate data flowing unhindered through a 5-stage pipeline. The datasets necessary to feed these pipelines may live in data lakes throughout the enterprise, on premises and/or in the cloud. This increases design and operational complexity where data silos lead to a lack of visibility into data types and locations, making it difficult to manage or use in AI workloads.

As provider in hybrid multicloud, the company eases this complexity by delivering high performance all-flash and cloud storage that enable customers to build modern data lakes and accelerate AI. Users can trace multiple AI model versions in production back to their training data to ensure they are using AI responsibly and storage is integrated with MLO/s platforms so data scientist experience easier consumption and increased productivity.

The Ontap AI converged infrastructure stack leverages AI supercomputing system – Nvidia DGX – to enable enterprises everywhere to tackle the most complex AI workloads with an infrastructure solution that eliminates design and deployment complexity. The company also announced that the AFF C-Series with capacity flash has been added to the Ontap AI architecture to improve affordability and sustainability.

“Enterprises that want to tap into the power of generative AI need a platform that can deliver fully customized models leveraging the immense corpus of their business data, tailored to their unique vocabulary, intellectual property, and industry,” said Charlie Boyle, VP, DGX platform, Nvidia Corp. “Powered by Nvidia DGX systems and Nvidia AI Enterprise software, NetApp Ontap AI enables businesses to tap into their data to deliver generative AI applications by leveraging a scalable, efficient, rapidly deployable infrastructure solution.”

The company continues to build AI data pipelines that integrate into 3 major public clouds for a true hybrid multicloud experience. At INnsight 2023, Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud, spoke to the ongoing innovation and partnership between NetApp and his firm, highlighting the August 2023 introduction of Google Cloud NetApp Volumes. The 2 firms are announcing support for Google Cloud’s Vertex AI with Google Cloud NetApp Volumes to support hybrid Generative AI applications.

“Launched in August, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes revolutionizes enterprise workloads in the cloud, with new levels of storage performance combined with simplicity and flexibility,” said Ronen Schwartz, SVP and GM, cloud storage, NetApp. “For customers investing in Generative AI data pipelines, this offering allows NetApp data on-premises to connect directly to Google’s Vertex AI on Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, with no additional engineering.”

With Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, the firm became the only company to deliver the same enterprise storage offering on-premises and as a native 1st-party service in the 3 largest public clouds, that also include Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

With advancements to its cloud ML technology, Amazon Sagemaker, already supporting Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, will add Amazon Sagemaker notebooks, which can access AWS FSx for Ontap via the native S3 object protocol – even for data originally stored in the NFS file format on-premises or in a different cloud.

“Generative AI is a powerful tool with the potential to help companies achieve transformational business insights and operational efficiencies,” said Archana Venkatraman, research director, cloud data management, IDC Europe. “However, AI workloads are only as powerful as the data they receive. Companies need a solid foundation of unified data management to ensure data flows to their respective AI infrastructures unhindered. The latest innovations from NetApp show deep and focused thought over the last five years about helping organizations collect, prepare, and manage their data wherever it lives. This rooted approach reflects the reality of how organizations build AI infrastructure and store data across on-prem, hybrid, and public cloud environments.”

Market-leading data storage security against ransomware and expanded DR
In 2023, the vast majority of ransomware attacks caused losses ranging between $1 million and $2.25 million. To mitigate this, the company is helping customers protect themselves and their data with the most secure storage and backing it with a Ransomware Recovery Guarantee.

Leveraging Ontap’s combination of key built-in security and ransomware protection features, Onrap can automatically block known malicious file types, rogue admins, and malicious users with multi-admin verification, and provide tamper-proof snapshots that can’t be deleted – even by the storage administrator. With industry threat detection efficacy, Ontap’s autonomous ransomware protection can detect attacks in near real time, take additional snapshots, and enable recovery within minutes.

The storage company extended its Ransomware Recovery Guarantee, available for all on-premises Ontap-based storage systems, including the firm’s AFF, ASA and FAS. With this guarantee, the company will warrant snapshot data recovery in the event of a ransomware attack. If data copies can’t be recovered through NetApp or one of its trusted partners, the firm will offer compensation ^(*).

“NetApp customers can harness their data for agile application delivery with resilience and governance to ensure business continuity,” said Takeshi Sato, Shibaura Institute of Technology. “These updates position NetApp squarely as the industry’s most secure data storage against ransomware.”

In conjunction with the Ransomware Recovery Guarantee, the company provides customers with added peace of mind with its Ransomware Assurance Service, which helps ensure their systems are protected vs. ransomware attacks. This service validates a customer’s configuration for secured data snapshots and conducts a recovery test. With a dedicated team always available, customers can rely on the firm to assist in data recovery in the event of an attack.

The company and its partners drive security and resiliency across the entire infrastructure stack. For example, the firm’s partnership with Cisco Systems, Inc. delivered a collection of secure architectures for FlexPod converged infrastructure, which include ransomware recovery and secure segmentation.

The firm also announced the public preview of a new DR solution for VMware, integrated directly into the BlueXP unified control plane. It provides a storage available on premises and on every major public cloud for VMware infrastructure. It can provide a single solution for DR from on premises to the cloud, minimizing the cost of providing standby DR infrastructure. With the BlueXP DR for VMware solution, a few simple steps enable easy failover and failback from an on-premises VMware infrastructure directly to the public cloud, starting with AWS FSx for NetApp ONTAP, or to an alternative on-premises data center.