NetApp has announced new capabilities for strategic cloud workloads, including GenAI and VMware. These enhancements to NetApp’s data and storage services aim to reduce resource requirements and minimize risks for customers managing these critical workloads across complex hybrid multicloud environments.

“Enterprises in APAC are eager to tap the innovative power of GenAI and virtualized environments. Yet they are often held back by complexity, security and cost constraints,” said Matthew Swinbourne, CTO Cloud Architecture at NetApp Asia Pacific. “The range of enhancements announced by NetApp today aims to address challenges like these. With a robust, intelligent data infrastructure, APAC organizations will be able to harness their entire data estate, maximize their GenAI investments, and usher in a new era of innovation.”

To advance intelligent data infrastructure deployments that better support strategic workloads like GenAI and VMware environments, NetApp is announcing new capabilities, including:

• NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory – for AWS: This intelligent data infrastructure service uses defined industry best-practices to automate the planning, provisioning, and management of cloud resources and services for key workloads, including GenAI, VMware cloud environments, and enterprise databases. Customers can use BlueXP workload factory to optimize deployment time, cost, performance, and protection of resources for strategic workloads as well as their associated data. To simplify workload migrations to the cloud, BlueXP workload factory allows users to profile infrastructure requirements for target workloads and compare different resource options for cost and performance needs. Then, the service can provision the selected resources, move any existing workload data to these newly provisioned cloud deployments, and continually optimize the entire environment to ensure the required cost and performance targets. AWS users can read guidance on how to deploy this capability on the AWS Solutions Library.
• NetApp GenAI Toolkit – Microsoft Azure NetApp Files Version: Customers can now include private enterprise data stored in Azure NetApp Files in their retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows in a secure, programmatic manner. The result is an enhanced ability to generate unique, high-quality, and ultra-relevant results from GenAI projects by combining their proprietary data with pre-trained, foundational models (FMs). The integration of the NetApp GenAI Toolkit with Azure NetApp Files represents a powerful synergy that empowers customers to harness advanced language generation capabilities.
• Amazon Bedrock with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Reference Architecture: Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and NetApp have released a joint reference architecture which provides guidance for customers on implementing RAG-enabled workflows that bring proprietary data stored on Amazon FSx for ONTAP into their GenAI data pipelines. Amazon FSx makes it easy and cost effective to launch, run, and scale feature-rich, high-performance file systems in the cloud. The reference architecture allows developers to use APIs for Amazon Bedrock to connect with Amazon FSx for ONTAP data stores, enabling the secure use of proprietary data with a choice of high-performing FMs that can be customized to unlock new insights and capabilities.
• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Enhancements: AWS announced the next-generation Amazon FSx for ONTAP cloud storage service with enhanced capabilities to boost scalability and flexibility to provide up to 6 GB per second of throughput for a single highly-available (HA) pair from 512 TiB of SSD storage. Next-gen file systems offer virtualized workloads more room to grow with a 300 percent increase in network burst throughput and a 150 percent boost in disk burst throughput. For large-scale, high-performance workloads like GenAI, second-generation Amazon FSx for ONTAP systems support dynamic scalability by adding HA pairs as needed, up to 24 nodes. This delivers up to 72 GB per second of throughput from 1 PiB of SSD storage, providing greater flexibility and performance for evolving business needs.
• NetApp BlueXP Disaster Recovery Support for VMFS: The BlueXP disaster recovery service, which provides guided workflows to design and execute automated disaster recovery plans for VMware workloads across both on-premises and cloud environments, has been expanded to support VMFS datastores for on-premises to on-premises disaster recovery.

These updates build on NetApp’s existing offerings that support storage and data operations for customers that need to implement and manage high-powered, strategic workloads such as GenAI and VMware environments. For example, NetApp recently announced that its unique BlueXP data classification capability, which automatically classifies and categorizes data for enhanced governance and secure ingest into GenAI and RAG data pipelines, has become a core control plane capability now available free of charge to all NetApp customers.