Domino Data Lab and NetApp Partner

Domino Data Lab, Inc., provider of enterprise AI, and NetApp, Inc. announced a collaboration to help enterprises unlock AI’s full transformative power using NetApp’s advanced hybrid file storage technology in Domino.

For the 1st time, companies can use one platform to manage both workloads and data movement in the hybrid cloud as well as across environments – making data AI-ready anytime, anywhere and simultaneously scaling data and AI, all with the efficiency, portability, and auditability required by enterprises.

AI’s transformational power remains elusive because enterprises compromise their AI initiatives. Data scientists and IT operate in silos where valuable resources, effort and time are spent trying to scale AI.

These initiatives lack the security and efficiency to innovate at the pace business leaders expect, and fall short of governance to comply with policies and regulations. The result is increased risk, excessive costs and lost revenue opportunities. By combining enterprise data and AI management across the AI lifecycle, the 2 partners are opening the path for new strategies devoid of such compromises.

“Enterprises cannot capture AI’s opportunity without a unified approach to data and models,” said Jonsi Stefansson, SVP and CTO, cloud operations, NetApp. “Intelligent data infrastructure from NetApp helps customers more easily manage their data across a hybrid cloud estate for AI training and inferencing. Our collaboration with Domino allows organizations with a single advanced, unified AI and data stack to scale AI innovation easily, quickly, safely and responsibly across the world’s largest clouds.“

The 2 companies will co-develop a joint capability streamlining hybrid data and AI operations – allowing data scientists using Domino to provision and share storage volumes across cloud and on-premises environments with a single click. Powered by NetApp Ontap and BlueXP, the integration will offer snapshotting, caching, and synchronization features, ensuring full data traceability and model reproducibility – a critical requirement for preserving audit trails and meeting regulatory compliance. With access to data, AI developers can innovate on models faster while simultaneously satisfying IT needs for secure data management.

“AI innovation stalls when teams must balance it with technical complexity and governance,” said Nick Elprin, co-founder and CEO, Domino. “Together with NetApp, we’re smashing these barriers, helping our customers unleash AI’s potential immediately.“

“Enterprises have invested heavily in big data, analytics, and cloud-based initiatives over the past decade, yet many still struggle to unlock the potential of AI,” said Howard Dresner, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC. “Cohesive methods for orchestrating models across any infrastructure and governing data precisely is key for responsible and efficient AI deployment.“

The joint solution also eliminates the need to choose between velocity and enterprise readiness, innovation and risk management, or value and ROI of AI initiatives. It does this by creating a common operating environment across all data and models, integration with the world’s largest clouds, and a common control plane – coupled tightly with the AI model development lifecycle to streamline the AI and data lifecycle.

This allows enterprises to:

• Scale AI and data simultaneously across any infrastructure: Costly data movements or delays impede data, infrastructure, and tool orchestration. Efficient data movement and replication, powered by Ontap, makes that data instantly and securely available at scale on the infrastructure where it’s needed for training and inferencing of models, with full resilience and security. Teams can co-locate data, infrastructure, and AI tooling with cloud bursting to accelerate AI projects, ensure compliance with data sovereignty regulations, and drive cost-efficient cloud or repatriation strategies.

• End-to-end AI and data governance to trust AI at enterprise scale: Joint governance capabilities enable full traceability, reproducibility, and auditability of all data, including metadata and artifacts. Domino captures this data from users and systems, while Ontap’s efficient snapshotting capabilities ensure full data provenance via immutable dataset copies, visibility on policy compliance, and enable audits without disrupting the AI lifecycle. This governance scope spanning AI and data saves time lost to forensics, compliance assessments, and risk mitigation.

• Put enterprise data at the fingertips of data scientists and AI builders: NetApp’s Data Explorer will power an abstraction of underlying infrastructure allowing data scientists to directly search and access available enterprise data anytime, anywhere without delay as they build models and processes. This shrinks AI project timelines and prevents the need for data engineering.

Domino Cloud running on Amazon FSx for NetApp’s ONTAP, is offering:

• Curation and sharing of robust, versioned data resources allowing data scientists to collaboratively iterate on model development faster, with write speeds improved by 417% and read speeds by 94% – reducing data loading times, training delays, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) inefficiencies-maximizing the return on AI projects and infrastructure investments.
• Efficient migration of data between on-premises and cloud environments with NetApp FlexCache technology, ensuring just-in-time availability, optimized performance, and consistent model governance across environments with Domino.
• Storage that grows and shrinks automatically based on needs, with integrated enterprise-grade security and no manual setup or maintenance.

Domino Cloud powered by Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is available on AWS Marketplace. Additional capabilities will be available in early 2025.

Additional Resources

• More about partnership.
• Learn to unlock the potential of AI in a new NetApp Community blog.
• More about the latest innovations in the Domino Enterprise AI Platform