KUALA LUMPUR, April 8: NetApp Malaysia Sdn Bhd said it has expanded its enterprise data platform with new capabilities aimed at helping organisations overcome one of the biggest barriers to artificial intelligence adoption: managing and governing data across complex global environments.
The company said the enhancements include the launch of NetApp AI Data Engine (AIDE), a secure and unified AI data platform stack co-engineered with NVIDIA and integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design.
The new offering is designed to help enterprises better discover, understand and govern unstructured data across their data estates, enabling them to use more accurate and up-to-date information throughout the AI pipeline, from data selection and transformation to retrieval, serving and deployment in 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 NetApp chief product officer Syam Nair in a statement.
“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.”
AIDE includes a continuously updated global metadata catalogue with search capabilities that go beyond standard file system metadata by analysing file content and semantically enriching metadata in place. This allows enterprises to avoid repeatedly moving data, helping to reduce both security risks and additional costs.
NetApp said AIDE will launch this month for an initial group of lighthouse customers and partners, with broader availability expected in early summer.
The company added that it will continue to expand integrations with independent software vendors across on-premises and cloud environments. These include support for AI development platforms and frameworks such as Microsoft Azure-based AI applications, Google Cloud Vertex AI and LangChain.
Over the coming months, NetApp said AIDE will also support a wider range of deployment options, including use with NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, as well as deployment across NetApp storage environments such as AFF A-Series, AFF C-Series and FAS.
Additional capabilities expected this summer include broader hybrid cloud support, multimodal data functionality for visual data and support for agentic AI workflows across enterprise environments.
Meanwhile, Cisco Compute senior vice president and general manager Jeremy Foster said that the partnership between NetApp and Cisco would help speed up enterprise AI adoption.
“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,” he said.
“Using NetApp AIDE with this solution moves AI to our customers’ data, right where it lives, speeding up data pipelines and delivering value faster.”
NetApp also said it will support NVIDIA STX, a modular rack-scale storage reference architecture for agentic AI built with NVIDIA Vera Rubin and NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs. The architecture is designed to improve power efficiency, throughput and security while helping enterprises better connect AI compute with unstructured data storage.
Jason Hardy, vice president of storage technologies at NVIDIA, said enterprises are increasingly seeking better ways to govern and use large data estates as AI adoption grows.
“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,” he said.
WE